Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

John:

I did a Google search of the postings at B-Hebrew, ibiblio.org and found
that your requests were concerning books that I have not had the opportunity
to read. Therefore, I could not give an honest evaluation of them.

My reaction to Jim Stinehart was initially to try to ignore him: “This guy
is an absolute ignoramus, yet he is lecturing us?!!” Since then he has toned
down his didactic style a bit, but it is still there.

But when his articles (they are too long to be considered mere posts)
garnered less opposition, and he started posting two, even three, articles a
day, I noticed that he was sucking the air out of the discussion group.
People were leaving because of that. Something had to be done, or I should
leave too. When the moderators did nothing, I tried to shame Jim into
admitting his ignorance, but I was the one who got in trouble for that
tactic. I tried ridicule, and again the moderators came down on me. It was
only after the moderators started shutting down Jim’s threads for lack of
scholarship that he started mining books and blogs for linguistic data to
try to bolster his arguments.

He is still bullying the group into letting B-Hebrew be his private
publishing forum. And his basic thesis continues to be his view of history,
not questions about Hebrew. He continues to distort the data he has, and to
ignore data that contradicts his thesis. But the demand for greater
scholarship is causing him to publish less often; seldom more than one
article a day, and sometimes a few days pass between his articles.

In closing, I noticed the patterns you mentioned. I continue to claim that
the moderators, by giving him X number of second chances, are still
appeasers. This discussion group is for the purpose of studying the language
of Biblical Hebrew, not history. Because his main thesis continues to be
history, which is off topic for this group, I think the moderators are wrong
to give him a forum to publish his articles.

Karl W. Randolph.