Blue Cord

Scott Callaham has added an entry to the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary on Walther Eichrodt.  It is very well done and includes not only a summary of his work but also a critical evaluation.  If you are unfamiliar with Eichrodt, who wrote one of the two main OT theologies of the 20th century, I encourage you to check it out.  You might also want to read it if, like me, you know Eichrodt’s work but would like a refresher.

I wanted to call people’s attention to an article I have in this month’s SBL Forum.  It is a discussion of the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary.  As the director of the project, I wanted to discuss the ideas behind the dictionary and perhaps generate a little interest among potential authors.  Because the SBL Forum focuses on the use of Wikipedia in the classroom and scholarship, it made sense to include an article about the Bible dictionary, since it employs the wiki model as well.

The Blue Cord Bible Dictionary has hit the ground running.  Having sent out an e-mail earlier this week asking for contributors, I have been amazed at the response.  So far we have ten contributors signed up, including one in the Netherlands and two in the Philippines.   A number of people who were not recipients of my original mailing have volunteered, which means the notice is getting passed around.  This is exactly what I hoped would happen, but it is happening faster than I had hoped.

Entries are already being written, and I am learning some new things myself.  One contributor has put up articles on intertextuality and the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, neither of which I knew anything about.  I am enjoying getting to read articles on topics that I have not explored before.

If you would like to contribute to the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary, I encourage you to sign up.  The more people we have working on this the quicker it will become a resource for students.  If you want to volunteer, send me an e-mail with the password you would like, and I will add you to the list of contributors.

Yesterday, I sent out a notice to several friends announcing that the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary was now up and running and asking them to join as contributors. The response has gone far beyond what I expected. Apparently, some people passed the notice on to other biblical scholars they knew (as I had asked them to do), and several people who were not on the original list have already contacted me to join. It looks like there is a lot of interest in this out there.

Below is the letter I sent out. I also want to announce the call for contributors here, and since I don’t feel like retyping it, I will just cut and paste what I already wrote. Here is the letter:

Recently, I decided to acquire my own web space and domain name. So, www.bluecord.org was born. Heady with the thought of all the possible things I could do with the space, I began to think about how I could use this web site. The main reason I bought it was to host a biblioblog. For those who don’t know about biblioblogs, these are blogs devoted to the academic study of the Bible. Unlike most blogs, these actually have something useful to say. Mine is found at bluecord.org/biblioblog, and you can find a good list of other ones at www.biblioblogs.com.

But this was hardly going to take up my 15 gigabytes of disk space, so I set about trying to find something else to do with all that room. One of the things that guided my search was the frustration I have had with undergraduate students doing biblical research on the web. As we all know, the web has a lot about the Bible, but only a small percentage of it is worthwhile. Since beginning students have a limited ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, they often came back with bad research. I hate to limit them to library resources, especially since here in Lithuania our library is limited, but what else could I do?

What else I could do is the purpose of this letter. I decided to set up an on-line Bible Dictionary that would provide students and other people who are interested in the Bible with reliable information that would aid their study. This way, I could allow them to use the Internet but know that they were getting reliable information. So, I have installed a wiki. For those who don’t know, a wiki is a web site where anyone can edit the content of the site, creating new pages and links easily (the name comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, which means ‘quick’). But unlike regular wikis, this one will be limited to authors that have at least a master’s degree in biblical studies or a related field (e.g., archaeology, classics, Egyptology, Assyriology).

This is where you come in. I would like to invite you to become a contributor to this on-line Bible Dictionary. If you join, this can be a project to which you can contribute at your own speed. You do not have to write complete articles. If you write a paragraph on one page, others can come in and write more. You can write as much or as little as you wish. Obviously, this is a volunteer project, so you will have no deadlines or quotas. You may write on topics you like, when you want. You can go months without writing or contribute daily. If you have a particular topic you would like to cover in class, you can write it up here so students can read more. And you may find that someone else has already written on it, which means you have a site to which you can send your own students for information.

The beauty of such a web site is that not only will it provide our students with reliable information, but it will always be up-to-date. For example, when new discoveries such as the Gospel of Judas are published, we can have a page up the next day. And, because of the collaborative nature, a diversity of points of view will be available for our students.

If you would like to check out the beginnings of the project (I have only worked on framework issues without writing any articles yet), you may go to www.bluecord.org/biblewiki. If you decide to become a contributor, please send me your name and complete educational history, and I will issue you a user name and password. The complete educational history is not so I can check whether you actually have the credentials (I will take your word for it), but so I can add your name and educational background to the contributors pages, so that users will see the high quality of scholars we have contributing to this work.

Another aspect of the web page is the front end, found at bluecord.org. Of interest to you here would be the resources section. I intend this to be a place where scholars can upload syllabi, Power Point presentations, handouts, and other information they would like to share. This will be of use to us as teachers as well as to anyone who comes to the site to do Bible study.

I hope you will give the proposal careful consideration. I look forward to hearing from many of you and to working with you on this project. Please feel free to pass this e-mail on to anyone you think might be interested in the project. The more scholars who contribute the quicker this will become a meaningful resource for our students.