Author Archives: jsolomons

James Carroll

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Great news and a great honor, James Carroll is coming to our class on Monday, to introduce our work on the New Testament and to talk particularly about the the Gospel of Mark.  Please be on time to class and come with questions for him.  the assignment is for you to post a paragraph long comment or thought about the book on the blog and to comment on one other person’s post.
If you want to know a little about him, you can go to his website at http://www.jamescarroll.net/JAMESCARROLL.NET/Welcome.html or look at his column that is published most Monday’s in the Boston Globe.

Satan in the Bible from Wikipedia

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Ha-Satan with the definite article occurs 13 times in the Masoretic Text, in two books of the Hebrew Bible:

Satan without the definite article is used in 10 instances, of which two are translated diabolos in the Septuagint and “Satan” in the King James Version:

  • 1 Chronicles 21:1, “Satan stood up against Israel” (KJV) or “And there standeth up an adversary against Israel” (Young’s Literal Translation)[8]
  • Psalm 109:6b “and let Satan stand at his right hand” (KJV)[9] or “let an accuser stand at his right hand.” (ESV, etc.)

The other eight instances of satan without the definite article are traditionally translated (in Greek, Latin and English) as “an adversary”, etc., and taken to be humans or obedient angels:

  • Numbers 22:22,23 “and the angel of the LORD stood in the way for an adversary against him.”
  • 23 “behold, I went out to withstand thee,”
  • 1 Samuel 29:4 The Philistines say: “lest he [David] be an adversary against us”
  • 2 Samuel 19:22 David says: “[you sons of Zeruaiah] should this day be adversaries (plural) unto me?”
  • 1 Kings 5:4 Solomon writes to Hiram: “there is neither adversary nor evil occurrent.
  • 1 Kings 11:14 “And the LORD stirred up an adversary unto Solomon, Hadad the Edomite“[10]
  • 1 Kings 11:23 “And God stirred him up an adversary, Rezon the son of Eliadah“
  • 25 “And he [Rezon] was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan

Essay 1 Notes

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Here are some general comments about Essay 1.  Ask if you have any questions.

First statement An essay (from the French essayer) is what Einstein calls a thought experiment.  You take an idea an explore it based on some information.  In this case the text of the Bible.  You are not saying you are right or wrong, just that you have this idea and this is what this

You may rewrite your paper to improve the grade.  Do not just rewrite the whole paper, unless we have discussed it and feel that that is what you need to do.  Break up your rewriting in the same way I suggested you break up the writing process.

Here is how it works.

  1. You see your grade, and if you got less that 100% such as 1/2 for your thesis, you can raise your grade, all you need to do is to rewrite your thesis, and send it to me, or bring it to me in my office.
  2. The same goes for titles.
  3. To get a better grade for accuracy or MLA, take the graded paper and a different colored pen, make the changes and bring it to me, or re-type the paper, amke the changes so I can easily see them (color is good) and hand it to me with your graded paper.
  4. To raise your grade for Ideas and quotation rewrite just one or two paragraphs and show me that you know how to do this.  We will then discuss whether you need to do a full rewrite or just do more paragraphs or if you are done.
  5. For organization you need to re-do the paper, either on the graded paper with a color pen indicate what you will do to change the organization or rewrite the paper and with color indicate the changes you have made.

General Notes

  1. Develop a strong thesis before going to your final draft.
  2. Identify each sentence or parts of sentences as either facts (supporting information), observations (drawn from making connections between facts) and ideas (arguable statements about those observations) and then discussion of the ideas explaing the weight that should be put on the various observations.  These are all to be supported, every time, by explained quotes from the text or less ideally by explained summary of the text always with citation.
  3. When you choose quotes, make sure they support your thesis or that you can use them to discuss your thesis.  No need to quote, “Joseph brushed his teeth that day” (Gen 51.8).
  4. Do not summarize the story.  That is not  your job.  Something like:, “When Moses kills the slave and hides the body, we can see that he knows that he has committed a sin.” should be enough storytelling.
  5. Avoid questions, make statements instead.  Your statement only needs to be supported by the text, it does not matter if it is right or wrong in any wider sense.
  6. Write in the present tense and the active voice and move from there.  The Bible exists, so you can write about it in the present tense.
  7. Be careful about pronouns and antecedents, otherwise it can be hard to know who you are referring to.
  8. “Look up MLA if you are not sure” (Sol. 2.7).
  9. -ing words often cause difficulties.
  10. S- spelling, M-missing word, W-wrong word, P-punctuation, T-tense, (X)-suggested excision,

Citing the Footnotes from Harper Collins Bible.

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Example of how to quote footnotes.

You need to cite the source the same way  you would any source.  In this case the author is the editor of the edition: William Attridge et al.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut” (Attridge et al 256).

or

Attridge et al in the Harper Collins Study Bible, write: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut” (256).

The bibliographic entry that would follow the above example would be as follows:

  • The Harper Collins Study Bible. Ed. William Attridge et al. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Print.

 

Essay 1

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If you have questions about Essay 1, pleases think about posting them here, as then we have a public record of the questions that have been asked.

I said in class today that I want you to track your progress with the essay and hand in all the notes you take, and your drafts so that you and I can see the process  you went through to produce the final paper.  This is a crucial part of developing as a writer, and it doesn’t matter how far along you are, as a writer, you will learn and improve from doing this.