Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Eric Rasmusen <erasmuse AT indiana.edu>]

   Biblical Hebrew  is a subject that (a) it's
easy to get into interpretive arguments about,
and (b) it's important to talk about with people
of radically different beliefs.  This means 
posting on this list requires considerable
delicacy.  Most of the  disputatious postings
I've seen in the past few months have been
legitimate in substance but wrong in phrasing
and in not adapting a scholarly tone of 
  "Given my Assumption X, which you of course
might not share, here is how this word ought to
be intepreted."
 
 Perhaps it would be useful for the listmaster
to send every new subscriber a memo on
netiquette as it applies to this particular
list, with lots of examples of good and bad
posts, and examples of how a bad post could have
been rewritten to become a good post. Such a
memo would take considerable work to write,
though. Perhaps the listmaster, if interested,
could solicit off-list examples from those of us
on the list, and use that material? (Or perhaps
someone would volunteer, off-list,  to do this.
But we don't want such proposed  examples to be
posted on the list itself, since that would just
increase the frivolity. )

Eric Rasmusen, Indiana University