Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jason Hare <jaihare AT gmail.com>]

I know that when I first started to learn Biblical Hebrew, I used to
come to B-Hebrew with all kinds of questions. This list was a resource
that I couldn't have done without in those formative steps, but I feel
like the atmosphere was less dominated by pushers at that time. Then
again, I remember reading a lot of posts that intimidated me — but I
was able to ignore those and focus on the posters who were interested
only in questions of the language and what the words meant, rather
than on creating entire new historical frameworks and dating and so
forth.

I think the fact that we all receive so many messages through the list
now, the purpose of which are to create new and competing theories for
how to look at the Bible. It's probably just exhausting for everyone,
and no one feels like discussing the things that many of us feel are
lacking here. Part of the reason may be because we don't want the
posts to simply get lost in the shuffle (let's face it, that happens
quite a bit here). Yet, alternatively, we see those who dominate the
list and keep the back-and-forth going over things that most of us
consider to be absolutely irrelevant. Honestly, if I wanted to read
all this, I would buy a book from a reputed scholar regarding the
Patriarchal Narratives and sit down with it for a few days. This is
totally overkill.

I guess the start would be for people to start threads/topics dealing
with language questions (as I'm about to do) and try to move the list
in another direction. Yalla, let's get to it!

Jason Hare
Rehovot, Israel