However, these concerns are probably not the ones of the users whom Bulkeley had in mind for his commentary. There is certainly a wealth of information to be found on this CD, but the present reviewer remains sceptical whether a disc can really be an adequate substitute for some standard books such as a Hebrew Bible, a lexicon, and a concordance. Also in his goal not to offer a chosen path of interpretation for the user, Bulkeley runs the risk of losing his user/reader altogether. Sometimes it would have been helpful to know what Bulkeley actually thinks about the text, since I seriously doubt that the intended user without formal training is able to judge the scholarship adequately. All these quibbles aside, amongst the commentaries available for a general theological readership this is clearly one of the better ones.First the detail: Hagedorn says he "remains sceptical whether a disc can really be an adequate substitute for some standard books such as a Hebrew Bible, a lexicon, and a concordance." The Logos and Bibleworks programs of course demonstrate that it can ;) But I do not see HBC_ as a competitor with these. A commentary complements such tools.
The issue that Hagedorn raises with his comment that "Sometimes it would have been helpful to know what Bulkeley actually thinks about the text" is a significant one, and one about which I still have mixed feelings.
On the one hand it is frustrating that most reviewers of the commentary assume that I believe that the book of Amos was somehow written very close to the period in which the prophetic speeches it contains are set. I don't. I am still convinced that something like Wolff's reconstruction of the redaction history of the book is likely, Coote's simplification of Wolff sometimes seems better because simpler, but at other times recognition of the complexity of everyday life convinces me that even Wolff's scheme is probably an over-simplification. But we do not and cannot know. We can make intelligent guesses, like Wolff's, about the history of the redaction of the book (though by the time I finish reading Van Seters I may be convinced we can dispense with the notion of redactors ;) But all we can know is the book, and the setting in which it presents "Amos", that is what I choose to read... My readers attributing to me a naive historicism is frustrating.
But on the other hand, I have been delighted when in one week an Orthodox Rabbi and a Messianic pastor write to me thanking me for the work, I chuckle when in the same month small groups of Brazillian Catholics were using my commentary in their study of Amos, while somewhere to the north of them whole Sunday Schools of Southern Baptists were doing the same! On the whole I would not choose to exchange this delightful (if ironic) understanding of Scripture by such diverse groups to undo the misunderstanding (of my position on the possible/likely history of composition and transmission of the book) by scholars.
It will be interesting when other writers for the series have written and we can compare how different judgement calls on this issue work.
Labels: amos, bible.software, biblical.studies.online, review
¶ 10:24 AM
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For now I will just quote the closing paragraph, and bask!
The digital revolution has altered the way people shop and interact. In this unique commentary, Bulkeley suggests that the revolution extends to the way people learn and that the organization of information ought to reflect that transformation. The field of biblical studies is in many ways a conservative endeavor. Scholars work with ancient and venerable things. This commentary, however, suggests that one need not work with them in ancient and venerable ways. With the rise of the internet, the landscape of learning is changing, and Bulkeley helps the reader explore the possibilities of this new terrain. With a vast array of sound files, photos, encyclopedic articles, and traditional commentary on verses, readers of various levels of training and expertise can browse the commentary and construct a rather different experience, based upon the links pursude or ignored. Because the internet permits learning to occur as controlled chaos, the person who searches on the webexercises a vaste amount of autonomy in the selection and utilisation of resources. Bulkeley's commentary puts the reader in a similar position.
Labels: amos, open.access.scholarship, open.biblical.studies, review
¶ 9:22 PM
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Congratulations for all that you are doing with the Hypertext Bible Tim, and the good review on Amos.
The fact that you are in an isolated refugee camp and was able to read the review adds another dimension to how the digital revolution must impact biblical studies and the theological world--by making these studies accessible to the sort of people you are teaching.
Keep staying in the forefront of this revolution of digital literature and distance education.
One day people will listen to you and it will set in motion an avalanche of interest and affirmation for all you are doing.
I'll give you just a taster to whet your appetites:
(Judgment against hollow worship - 5:18-27)Incidentally I tried the same sort of thing for Amos 4:4-5 today? and I began to write an "Out of my Mind" column for the NZBaptist in 2003 using a quote from Joel Drinkard's article in which he rewrote the whole book. I planned the piece to begin like this:
"You want Jesus to come back? Yeah right! You know when He comes, He's going to judge the wicked, don't you!!?? It's not going to be fun for you! God says, 'Nothing makes me sicker than your conferences. I want to vomit during your church services. Even though you offer your so-called 'worship' I couldn't care less! I don't listen to junk like that! Will you please just shut up already?? I don't want to be your boyfriend! I want you to be passionate about justice! I want you to live lives that are righteous! Hello? Did you organise music festivals, worship conferences and other such 'Christian' things? I'll make your 'Hill' songs into 'Valley' songs – for the 'god' that you are worshipping is the music god you've made for yourself!!! I'm going to make you completely and totally irrelevant and non influential in your own culture. No one will care AT ALL what you have to babble on about!
This book should be banned. It attacks freedoms fundamental to our way of life, it ridicules our leaders, it seeks to undermine the very fabric of our society. It’s on sale openly in many NZ bookshops. What’s worse it’s available for free on the Internet. At least it’s not yet being taught in the schools my children attend – though I’ve heard that it might be taught in some schools.
Any book that lays siege to the way Western democracies live as blatantly as this one is probably written by a supporter of Osama bin Laden. To show you what I mean here’s an extract from near the beginning:
For three transgressions of America and for four
I will not revoke the punishment
because you spent millions to store surplus food
and permit varmints to eat that which could feed thousands of starving children,
because you pour milk on the ground,
saying the price is too cheap,
when infants in Ethiopia die without milk,
because you squander the world’s resources
thinking only of your own comfort,
because you turn to soap operas for your moral values
and seek success as your most important virtue.
So you shall suffer for your sins.
Your mammoth aquifers will be squeezed dry,
your bread basket will become a dust bowl,
your cities and your countryside will become
polluted by sin,
your national symbol will become the vulture
instead of the eagle.
You are big –
you will fall hard.
Thank goodness the anti-terrorism bill was recently passed by the NZ parliament. Perhaps now we can see that such works are not distributed more widely.
Joel F. Drinkard “Thus says the Lord” Review and Expositor 92, 1995, 222.
Labels: amos
¶ 3:44 PM
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By 
dale, at
November 21, 2007 4:36 PM
Thanks Tim, :)
The NBC site is actually being contructed, and we hope to get it up for the beginning of the year (events, contact info, mp3's of sermons, etc.)...
A couple months ago, all you would have gotten would have been a page that didn't load! :)
Cheers,
-d-
By dale, at
November 21, 2007 4:37 PM
So's the BBC one, honest! Or at least, even more honest, we are talking about it...
By Tim, at
November 21, 2007 5:16 PM
by the way, our church website is 'up' now... :)
-d-
I intend when I have time to reflect (some months away probably - maybe at the start of my sabbatical :) to respond to some of the negative comments and the suggestions reviewers have made. Some of these should lead to significant improvements in the conception of future volumes. That was one reason for sending out review copies of a work that was already available online, to get the academic "system" involved in improving the concept.
So, if you are a reviewer and I have not yet emailed you, expect some contact after the end of this year.
By the way the reviews I am currently aware of are:
- R.E. Clements in John Day (ed.), Society for Old Testament Study Book List 2007, London: Sage, 2007, 70.
- Joan Ferrer, Butlletí de l’Associació Bíblica de Catalunya 93: Sept 2006, 56.
- Knut Holter, BOTSA Electronic Forum [http://www.mhs.no/article_547.shtml] (2006).
- James R. Linville, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 69, 2007, 316-318.
- Ehud Ben Zvi, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2007).
- International Review of Biblical Studies 52, 2005-2006, 162.
Labels: amos, peer-review
¶ 10:10 AM
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Best paper so far at SBL award ::
For me, and any such judgement is bound to be gloriously subjective, though in this case supported (according to the clapometer) by the others in the room, the best paper so far at SBL has to be Sara Milstein's "Recapturing the Prophet: Identifying Amos' Call Narrative in 3:2-8".Sara argued neatly and succinctly that the prey in Amos 3:3-8 is not (as is usually assumed) Israel, but Amos. The change of voice and form between 3:1-2 and 3-8 suggests that we not be too quick to identify the "two who walk together" as YHWH and Israel... None of the traps and disasters in 3-8 tells of the death of the prey, yet elsewhere Amos is not reluctant to proclaim Israel's death! The language of capture (4b & 5b) and fear (6a & 8a) serves suggest that the prophet is YHWH's prey (as Jeremiah will be in Jer 20:7ff. though the seduced Jeremiah is a human prey, while Amos the herdsman is an animal in a trap).
I haven't the space, or the memory to summarise Sara's agruments properly, sufficient for now to say that she neatly supported her claims till the conventional reading of the passage seemed forced and her reading natural. I am totally convinced by her reading, except for the name "call narrative", if Amos 3:3-8 describes or argues for Amos' call, and Sara convinced me it does, it is not a "narrative". But then as Sara points out, we name the genre after the versions in Isaiah and Jeremiah (perhaps including Ezekiel), yet Amos can (perhaps - I have doubts over the dating of the material in the book) claim "prior art". Maybe the genre already (if we include Ezekiel) quite diverse is not prophetic call narrative but something like "justification of a prophet's call".
The paper that followed Roger Nam's "Grain, Wine and Oil in the Northern Prophets:The Socio-economic Background of an Agricultural Metaphor" was also a prime example of stimulating work. Roger moved confidently from a summary recasting of the archaeological data to a comparative linguistic examination of the terms concerned. Another paper I must follow up... And perhaps more grist for a new edition of Amos ;-)
[In the interests of full disclosure of interest, I must confess that Sara cited my 1999 paper and it is always gratifying when ones work comes back to haunt one. On that, I'll wait till I read her paper at more leisure, to decide if I am convinced by her there too, or if I still stand by Bulkeley 1999!] ¶ 4:06 PM
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First print review of Amos Commentary
The first print review of Amos: Hypertext Bible Commentary that I am aware of (do tell me if you know an earlier one!) appeared in the Butlletí de l’Associació Bíblica de Catalunya 93: Sept 2006, 56
Since I cannot really read Catalan I would be delighted if someone could translate for me! Though with a mixture of some Spanish from a holiday during my teenage years and French I managed to decipher most of it.
Isn't it lovely that the first review should come from somewhere as far from NZ as possible in a language that has VERY few native speakers within thousands of miles of here (there must be a Catalan community in Australia, I'd guess).
Labels: amos
¶ 11:50 AM
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What's next - future media ::
Christianity Today has an article “What’s Next: Publishing and Broadcasting”. (HT to Think Christian who posted snippets, and before that to Lingamish for noticing!)
Isn't it nice when the “mainstream media” deign to think about the future ;-)
Two items from the comments (on Think Christian) really struck me.
The first is daft, Donnell Duncan writes:
I have a website and I’m publishing a book soon. Even though it’s 2006, for at least another twenty years, I expect the influence of my book to extend just as far as my website.Well no Donnell, unless your “book” is a fiction bestseller like Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code, it's likely that a website will have far more impact.
Suppose your print book sells 1,000 copies (which at least in Biblical Studies would be strong sales) and 250 of those are to libraries. Suppose, what's more, that on average individual owners loan the book to three other people over the next twenty years, that would make 3,000 readers. Again let's assume that each library copy is read 100 times before falling to bits – 25,000 readers. Wow, that's nearly 30,000 readers over the twenty years :)
Now let's compare my Amos commentary, about 900 different IP addresses “visit” the material each day. Of course most of those are Google visitors who do not find what they want and move on, though since somebody looks at over 8,000 pages per day some visitors are reading quite a bit. If we assume one print page of your book is equivalent to 4 web pages from Amos that would be 2,000 pages of your book each day, if the book is 250 pages long that's 8 cover-to-cover readers daily, or nearly 3,000 per year. So on a conservative estimate (and every year so far readership of the online material has grown) the web “book” is about twice as influential as the print one ;-)
Dusty Bogard by contrast is a future focused commentator. He quotes Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems:
I was in a European airport a few weeks ago, waiting in a lounge with about 100 other people – when I had to revise my world view. Most people had mobile handsets – we all would’ve predicted that. But no one was talking on their phone. They were all looking at them, and either browsing or text’ing or playing a game – but no one was making a voice call… Which only strengthens my belief that most people in the world will first experience the internet on their handset. Which means most businesses in the world trying to reach those consumers or leverage the internet should broaden their horizons.Eeek, we need a .mobi domain and site optimised for WAP (and/or XHTML-MP - can anyone tell me which or how?) for the PodBible project, there's a whole bunch of potential listeners we have hardly started to supply. I'll register the domain, does anyone know someone who can turn an RSS podcast feed into a WAP or XHTML-MP site?
Labels: amos, internet, mobile, wap
¶ 6:11 AM
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Hey Tim,
I've been thinking about a WAP centred project for a while.
If you send me an email with exactly what you're looking for in a .mobi address I'd be happy to have a look into it (content, use, posting platform, etc).
Aparently large parts of Africa also mainly use (or are predicted to use) WAP technology to access the internet. I think it could further "free" the podbible.
By 
Craig (mars-hill), at
October 25, 2006 10:41 AM
Here's the deal. People will (and probably already do) want to listen to PodBible on their 'phones. Increasingly (as far as I can predict) they will use WAP etc. to download directly to the 'phone, instead of to the PC first and then move onto 'phone.
There is now a TLD targeted at 'phones. So I have registered PodBible.mobi We currently have RSS feeds (chapter-a-day and Bible-in-a-year) that are (by the wonders of PHP I assume) transmuted into webpages. What I need to do is to make those (and a brief description of the project (perhaps) available in 'phone friendly format. Which for .mobi means XHTML-MP. See http://pc.mtld.mobi/mobilenet/dotmobi_guides.html
This is not urgent, though as months pass it will become more urgent...
I know a little about XHTML, and can set Dreamweaver to insist on it, but I know as yet nothing about either the -MP version or PHP....
So, if you can help that would be great!
By Tim, at
October 25, 2006 11:33 AM
Tim,
Please keep me in the loop on this. I'm interested in making Scripture portions available in Africa by SMS. Maybe some of us could put together a wiki project on this (pbwiki.com) and see what we can gather.
Technology and resources for the average African tends to be limited so their phones are older and they can't afford long downloads, but SMS is very popular and cheap.
Kouya.net put me on to Phoney Bible (http://www.phoneybible.org/) which is making the Bible available in quite a few langauges as a Java app for mobiles.
Cheers!
By lingamish, at
October 25, 2006 9:05 PM
If no-one with more professional experience weighs in soon, I'd be happy to give it a good attempt over the next few months. Let me know.
By Craig (mars-hill), at
October 26, 2006 2:39 AM
Lingamish, for offering an SMS based service you might look at The Australian Bible Society's SMS Bible, you would need to adapt the "translation" but an open source approach would work for that!
By Tim, at
October 26, 2006 6:19 AM
Tim,
I'm familiar with ABS's SMS Bible but I was disappointed to discover it is PC-based. If someone would host it and folks could SMS scripture directly from their phone or request a Scripture I'd be happy.
