Blue Cord

My site has been down for the past 24 hours or so. Apparently someone has been exploiting a hole in the frontend of Joomla to install phishing schemes on my server. I have found and removed two of them in the last ten days, but my host, bluehost.com, found another and decided to suspend my account. Apparently dropping me an e-mail and asking me to remove the phishing files was too much trouble. But, the files have been removed and they have restored my service.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Update: It now appears that in the process of restoring my site, several critical files were deleted from my Joomla installation. This means the front end of my site is no longer working. All in all, this is not a big problem, as I had intended to remove Joomla and create my own site by hand using Dreamweaver. But it will be a couple of weeks before I can create the new site, so the home page of Blue Cord will not be up and running in the meantime. Fortunately, this blog runs on WordPress instead of Joomla, so it is not affected.

I was reading a document on the accreditation process for colleges and universities. It was rather critical of the fact that accrediting agencies include diversity as one of the criteria they consider in accreditation. I got me thinking about a few issues around diversity that I thought I would share.

I think one of the serious errors that is made on all sides of the debate is that we don’t distinguish between diversity and respect for diversity. Often, the word diversity is used to mean either or both. This seems to lead to some confusing by people on both sides of the aisle.

Those on the left say they want to encourage diversity, while those on the right say that diversity creates division. Both have good points, but I think we need to be more careful in our terminology.

For instance, I think liberals miss the mark when they say that we should encourage diversity. Why we should encourage diversity is unclear, unless it is simply the American knee-jerk reaction in favor of hyper-individualism. Why should I try to be different from everyone else? Being the same as someone else does not diminish my individuality in any way. True individuality does not come from wearing unique clothing, driving a car no one else has, or any of the other outward things that people often use as a substitute for individuality.

But while I am not in favor of encouraging diversity for diversity’s sake, I am very much in favor of encouraging respect for diverse people and cultures. This is not the same as encouraging diversity. It merely means that when I find diversity, I acknowledge it and don’t try to change it to fit into a preconceived mold. Encouraging diversity means forcing myself or someone else to be different; respect for diversity means allowing someone else to be different.

Where I think conservatives have it wrong is in the opposition to diversity. While they are correct to oppose the idea that we should not make people be different, they are wrong when they say that diversity itself is wrong. Diversity itself is neither right nor wrong. It is simply a fact of existence. The question is how we respond to diversity.

Diversity is always going to be present in any society, even in the supposed melting pot of America. Their is danger in the pendulum swinging both way. Having a lot of diversity brings about a very dynamic society, but that creative energy often comes at the price of lessened stability. Societies with lower diversity are more stable, but risk stagnation.

Conservatives want to encourage the continuation of the melting pot ideal, while liberals want us to become multicultural. Neither is the correct approach. Although we talk about the melting pot of America in the 18th century, the animosity between Irish, Italian, Chinese, and others, especially in large cities like Boston and New York, shows that we never achieved that ideal. On the other hand, the United States will never be fully multicultural. Once people move to an area outside of their own culture, they begin to change. Even when they preserve elements of their culture, those elements become adapted to the new society. Successive generations find it harder and harder to connect to a culture they never experienced first hand, and end up adopting something of the majority culture.

In other words, there will be diversity no matter what we do, and we must learn to respect that diversity.  At the same time, the diversity of new elements will wane over time as they become acclimated to the culture of the majority, although the culture of the majority will be modified somewhat by the process.

All of these processes are sociological in nature.  It is a shame that people are distorting them for political ends.

I am trying out some new technology as I blog. I am in Washington , DC, for the night and don’t have my computer with me, but I do have my new T-Mobile Dash, which has a keyboard and WiFi capability. So I am blogging on the fly.

I am visiting with Steve Cook of the blog Biblische Ausbildung, who was gracious enough to put me up for the night. He and his wife adopted a baby girl from China in March, and this is the first time I have had a chance to meet her. She is absolutly adorable!

I also wanted to take this chance to be the first blogger to wish Steve a happy birthday!

My thumbs are cramping up, so I think I will bring this post to a close.

One of the similarities between my vocation as a biblical scholar and my current job as a web designer is the fact that in both cases I am dealing with texts.  In the former I am interpreting a text, whereas in the latter I am writing texts.  A web page is, after all, a text, albeit a text that uses more than just words to get its message across.

An issue that is common to both fields is the question of how we read texts.  That is, how do people actually read the words that are put down on paper.  As an academic and an author, I like to think that people read every word I write and focus on every nuance.  In reality, I know better.  Even when writing a book, I know people are going to read it in different ways.  Few will do a deep reading, while some will scan it.  The majority lie somewhere in between.

On of the interesting things about the web, however, is that most pages on the web are scanned instead of read.  The majority of people spend about 2-3 seconds looking at the majority of the pages they come to.  The eye jumps to four or five spots on the page, and if those don’t capture the attention or contain the needed information, they move on.

This has major implications for the design of web pages, but more importantly it says something about how we get information.  Reading a book means (usually) reading all of the pages in a sequential order.  The author has a good deal of control over the information the reader receives, though little over what the reader agrees with or even remembers.  That kind of control is lost in web design.  You can lay out a well-balance and nutritious five-course meal on your page, but people will treat it like a buffet where they can take what they like and leave the rest.

The issue of how people read the text in ancient times is one that fortunately has also begun to receive attention in the field.  Because of our post-Gutenburg existence, we often make unwarranted assumptions about how a text was read in ancient Israel.  Texts were usually not wide-spread, which didn’t matter much in a society with perhaps 1-2% literacy.  The original readers, of course, we not readers at all.  They were hearers.

I think when talking about the original audience of the biblical text, we have to be very specific.  Are we talking about the general population?  If so, in what contexts did they encounter the text?  How large were the chunks they heard at any one time?  How often did they hear it?  For the people who were literate, we need to ask how they used the text.  Did they read it silently?  Aloud?  To whom?  Was it important for them to read it word for word, or did it merely serve as a reminder of the general outline of the story?  Were texts like Leviticus and Deuteronomy read at one sitting or used more as a reference work?

It is clear that we need to move beyond our simplistic concepts of what a reader is.

I am a bit behind the curve on this one, but it doesn’t bother me much because my interests outside the OT are more Egyptological than Assyriological. Nevertheless, for those readers who have not heard about this, I wanted to offer a brief post on the Nabu-sharrussu-ukin tablet that has been making waves in the biblioblogosphere.  The news is reported in the London Times.

The story, in a rather simplified form, boils down to this. Michael Jursa, a researcher at the British Museum, has recently translated a Babylonian tablet from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the king who attacked Jerusalem in 597 and 587 BCE and deported the people of Judah to Babylon. The tablet is a receipt for a donation to the temple, presumably so Nabu-sharrusu-ukin could claim the deduction on his taxes.  (If you think filing taxes is hard now, just think of what it must have been like to fill out a 1040 form in clay.)  The tablet reads as follows:

(Regarding) 1.5 minas (0.75 kg) of gold, the property of Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief eunuch, which he sent via Arad-Banitu the eunuch to [the temple] Esangila: Arad-Banitu has delivered [it] to Esangila. In the presence of Bel-usat, son of Alpaya, the royal bodyguard, [and of] Nadin, son of Marduk-zer-ibni. Month XI, day 18, year 10 [of] Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.¹

The excitement comes from the fact that Jursa identifies Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief eunuch, with Nebo-sarsekim, the chief eunuch in Jeremiah 39:3.  In that verse, Nebo-sarsekim is one of the officials at the head of Nebuchadnezzars army when it besieges Jerusalem.  The name appears in the form Nebo-sarsekim in the NIV but not the NRSV.  For the reason for this and a discussion of why the NIV is probably correct in this case, I direct you to Chris Heard’s excellent post.

It would be easy to over-state the implications of this, as it is always exciting to find a biblical figure mentioned in a non-biblical text from the same time period.  There are reasons to be cautious about this identification, and Chris Heard deals with those in the post mentioned above. 

But even if the identification of Nabu-sharrussu-ukin with Nebo-sarsekim is correct, it does not add much to our knowledge of the period.  All it suggests is that whoever wrote this section of Jeremiah knew the names of the Babylonian officials who attacked Jerusalem. The historical accuracy of names like this in document concerning the fall of Jerusalem is not surprising.  Those sections in Jeremiah and 2 Kings were written very close to the events they narrate.  While they certainly give their own interpretation of the events, the accuracy of their knowledge of names and places has not often been questioned.  It is when these documents are writing about events centuries before that most historians begin to wonder about their accuracy.

1. The translation presented here is taken from the London Telegraph.  Presumably the translation is that of Jursa, the researcher who made the initial reading. [back]