Piecing Together the Past

Nearly fifty years ago, some Bedouin shepherds stumbled upon a cache of ancient texts in caves near the Dead Sea, thirteen miles east of Jerusalem. It soon became clear that this was the largest and most significant collection of manuscripts ever discovered in Palestine. Finds Included the oldest witnesses to the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts of Jewish scripture-the Christian Old Testament-along with nonbiblical manuscripts certain to illuminate the tumultuous period of the destruction of the Second Temple and the time of Christ. The singularity of these texts has brought about one of the most protracted and painstaking endeavors of contemporary scholarship on religious history and Scripture. One afternoon 1947, three Bedouin shepherds were herding their flocks in the vicinity of Wadi Qumran above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. They casually tossed a rock in acave opening and heard something break. Returning later, they discovered ten large pottery jars, one of which contained three scrolls wrapped in protective linen coverings. Four additional scrolls were soon discovered in the cave. Neither the Bedouin nor the antiquities dealer whom they contacted had any idea what the documents contained. Thinking the script to be some form of Syriac, the antiquities dealer solf four of the scrolls to the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan at St. Mark\u27s Monastery in Jerusalem. For approximately one hundred dollars, the metropolitan unwittingly purchased the oldest extant Hebrew text of the Book of Isaiah, an ancient Hebrew commentary on Habakkuk, and two unknown texts. The antiquities dealer sold the other three manuscripts to Eleazar Sukenik, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The scrolls were in such fine condition that they were all published almost immediately. The magnitude and antiquity of these finds soon became apparent, and the caves around Wadi Qumran were aggressively explored for additional scrolls. Of the many caves quarried, eleven near the Wadi yielded written material. Cave 11, the last to be discovered (1956), supplied several extensively preserved scrolls of Leviticus, Psalms, and other works whose state of preservation rivaled that of the original Cave 1 finds. Unfortunately, there were only about a dozen of these beautifully preserved scrolls. Most of the approximately eight hundred texts discovered in the Qumran caves were not scrolls but scraps from disintegrated scrolls. Cave 4 yielded its rich cache of more than 575 manuscripts in tens of thousands of pieces. The condition of the written material in the other caves was no better: Caves 2 and 3 and Caves 5 through 10 yielded only fragments of more than one hundred other texts. Lacking the protection of pottery jars and linen shrouds, these manuscripts had fallen prey to a host of aggressors over the centuries, from the moisture in the caves to the appetite of worms to the swords and sandals of the caves\u27 human visitors. The scrolls simply disintegrated over the centuries, with the result that rarely 5 percent of any individual manuscript survived. The few surviving pieces of discrete scrolls were separated from one another and jumbled indiscriminately in layers of dirt on the cave floors. The muddle of fragments was made all the more incomprehensible by the manner of their retrieval. The Bedouin had gathered and sold most of the initial fragments without any record of where they came from. Fortunately, subsequent scientific excavations of Cave 4 unearthed fragments that were manifestly part of the same scrolls represented by the Bedouin finds. This established that the Bedouin scraps had been removed from the floor of Cave 4 and thereby guaranteed the authenticity of the initial fragments

Towards a definition of Biblical preaching for the year 2000: an historical approach

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1647/thumbnail.jp

16th International NooJ 2022 Conference: Book of Abstracts

Libro de resúmenes presentados en la "16th International NooJ 2022 Conference", de modalidad híbrida, realizada en el ECU (Espacio Cultural Universitario, UNR) en Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina, entre el 14 y 15 de junio de 2022.Fil: Reyes, Silvia Susana. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Facultad de Humanidades y Artes; Argentin

Pedagogical Reflections: Presentation and Contextualization of Three Online Course Syllabi

This article presents a syllabus copy for the following online courses: (1) Survey of American Literature, (2) Survey of African American Literature, and (3) Workplace Writing. The article contextualizes the congruent syllabi grading components for a target audience of teachers who may be looking for ideas to assist in development of online courses

Terminology for Medical Journalism: Terminological Resources, Neology, and the COVID-19 Syndemic

This article aims to investigate the terminological needs of journalists reporting medical news in the context of the current COVID-19 syndemic. It presents the work context – medical journalism – and the professional group selected – dubbed ‘occasional medical journalists’, a subset of medical journalists – and analyses their terminological needs. It further offers a critical description of a selection of terminological and terminographic resources currently available to the professional category at hand, highlighting room for improvement. Lastly, it briefly explores the interdependence between the professional group, the syndemic, and neology, and provides a sample ad hoc terminological entry conceived to facilitate the correct use of Coronavirus-related terminology in the press

Sparse Representations for Fast, One-Shot Learning

Humans rapidly and reliably learn many kinds of regularities and generalizations. We propose a novel model of fast learning that exploits the properties of sparse representations and the constraints imposed by a plausible hardware mechanism. To demonstrate our approach we describe a computational model of acquisition in the domain of morphophonology. We encapsulate phonological information as bidirectional boolean constraint relations operating on the classical linguistic representations of speech sounds in term of distinctive features. The performance model is described as a hardware mechanism that incrementally enforces the constraints. Phonological behavior arises from the action of this mechanism. Constraints are induced from a corpus of common English nouns and verbs. The induction algorithm compiles the corpus into increasingly sophisticated constraints. The algorithm yields one-shot learning from a few examples. Our model has been implemented as a computer program. The program exhibits phonological behavior similar to that of young children. As a bonus the constraints that are acquired can be interpreted as classical linguistic rules

Lower Tanana flashcards

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019As part of a study of Lower Tanana, I found it expedient to create a learning tool to help myself gain familiarity with Lower Tanana. I chose to employ Anki, an open-source tool for creating digital flashcard based learning tools. With Anki, I created cards for individual Lower Tanana words and phrases. In producing the computer flashcards for Lower Tanana, I realized that they could serve as a highly flexible system for both preserving and learning Lower Tanana. Further, because of the built-in system flexibility, such systems can be created to aid in preserving and teaching other endangered languages