I had an appointment in Oak Harbor (WA) on Monday morning. On my way, the sun was rising as I was driving through Dugualla Bay, so I took a detour down the Dugualla Dike Road and took a few pictures. Unfortunately, it was raining and I was running a little late, so I didn't have much time for the pictures. One ended up blurry, and the other two (of the sunrise) aren't great, but here's the best of the lot:

I also took some pictures while driving, just to see how they'd turn out. Don't worry, I wasn't actually paying attention to the camera; I was just pointing and clicking while my eyes were on the road. Here's the best one:

As always, low-res copies of the photos are online at Photos del Rico

Some may have noticed my "furled" links in the sidebar in the past.

I've decided to move them out of the sidebar and into an RSS feed. There is also a link to my Furl page where I've entered link descriptions.

Not familiar with Furl? Think "Filed-away URL". If you're browsing the web, and you run into something you'd normally bookmark. Instead of bookmarking it, Furl it. You submit the URL using the Furl Toolbar. You categorize it, rank it, and enter comments. Furl takes a snapshot of the page and stores it for you and also stores the URL. That way, if the page moves later on, you've still got the cached page in your Furl list and can always go back to it. And (assuming you're dilligent in entering comments) you'll also remember why you bookmarked it.

I don't furl links frequently; sometimes it goes in spurts. I don't have an established metric for when I'll furl something as opposed to blog about it. Sometimes I'll both blog and furl.

Don't know about Furl? Check it out and see if it's for you.

I don't use the Graphical Query capability in the LDLS often. But I was looking at 1Ti 3.7 tonight. The last part of the verse goes like this:

ἵνα μὴ εἰς ὀνειδισμὸν ἐμπέσῃ καὶ παγίδα τοῦ διαβόλου.

The English (from the ESV) is “... so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.” Now, my question in looking at this has to do with the the second half. Is παγίδα τοῦ διαβόλου epexegetical? That is, does “into a snare of the devil” explain the disgrace being fallen into, or are these two seperate things? Or something else altogether? As the ESV repeats “into”, it's a safe bet that they see these as two seperate things. But I want to understand it, not just take someone else's word for it. 

I thought it might be enlightening to search for patterns based on morphology instead of patterns based on words. So I whipped out my Grapical Query Editor in the LDLS and pointed and clicked my way to:

A preposition, followed by a noun in the accusative case, followed by a verb in the subjunctive mood, followed by a conjunction, followed by a noun in the accusative case — the whole thing occurring, in that order, in the space of nine words or less.

I didn't find much. So I went back to the drawing board:

Here I used the super-groovy agreement operator to specify that I wanted my nouns to agree in case and number. I also got rid of the preposition part and changed the conjunction reference to an explicit καὶ. I ran the search again, and still didn't find much. What I did find wasn't applicable as there were articles and such before the second noun. I could've tweaked it further to account for that, but I was returning under 10 hits and none of them were helping me; tweaking wouldn't accomplish anything. Blast. So I don't have any more results to evaluate. Widening the field didn't help either.

Thankfully, I still have commentaries to look at. Knight (NIGTC on Pastorals) mentions:

The first aspect of this concern is that he will fall into “reproach” (ὀνειδισμός). From whom will the reproach come? That is to say, is ὀνειδισμός qualified by the genitive τοῦ διαβόλου or is it used absolutely? For the former, it is argued that the preposition εἰς is not repeated before παγίδα. For the latter, it is argued that the reproach follows from the potential bishop not having a good testimony from those outside and so is not restricted exclusively to the διάβολος. That consideration is more in line with the context. (Knight, 165)

Compare that to Ellicott, writing in the 1860's:

... the absence of the article before παγίδα being perhaps due to the preposition; comp. Winer, Gr. 19.2, p. 114. The exact connexion is somewhat doubtful, as the gen. may depend (a) on both, or (b) only on the last of the two substantives. The omission of the prep. before παγίδα (De W.) is an argument in favour of (a); the isolated position however of ὀνειδισμός and the connexion of thought in ch. 5.14, 15, seem to preponderate in favour of (b), ὀνειδισμός being thus absolute, and referring to 'the reproachful comments and judgment,' whether of those without (Chrys.) or within the Church. ... The expression παγίδα τοῦ διαβόλου ('snare laid by the devil;' apparently gen. originis, contrast ver. 6), occurs again in 2Ti 2.26; so similarly in 1Ti 6.9. It is here added to ὀνειδισμός, not epexegetically ... but rather as marking the temptations that will be sure to follow the loss of character; 'quid spei restat ubi nullus est peccandi pudor?' Calv. (Ellicott, 45).

If I knew half of what either of these two dudes have (had) forgotten, I'd be in incredible shape. However ... I do feel kind of good that it seems I actually asked the right question. That's a step up for me.

Conclusion: not epexegetical. Further question, though — does the “fronting” (hope I'm using that term correctly) of εἰς ὀνειδισμὸν before the verb have anything to do with the conclusion? In other words, could the position of these words before the verb provide any indication that the “trap of the devil” is not the same thing as the “disgrace”, but that it is (if I've understood all of this correctly) subsequent to the disgrace?

I'm sure there's an easy explanation to this.

Uncial 05 (Codex Bezae) and Uncial 06 (Codex Claromontanus) both have the letter 'D' assigned to them in the NA27 MS listing (pp. 691).

The texts are similar in that they are both Greek/Latin diglots, though Bezae is dated in the fifth century and Claromontanus in the sixth. (Metzger, Text of the New Testament 49-51) They do not have overlapping content; Bezae with Gospels/Acts (and a snippet of 3Jn) and Claromontanus with content from the Paulines.

Were these at one point considered to be the same MS? If not, why the same letter designator?

Quick checks of both Metzger and Aland didn't help with answering this question, apart from mentioning in passing that both MSS were in possession of Theodore Beza (though not stating if both texts were possessed by Beza at the same time).

Update: Thanks to James Tauber for the comment. It got me thinking — didn't the numbers come about with Caspar Rene Gregory's re-working of the whole system in the early 1900's, after his work on updating/completing Tischendorf's Edito Octava Maior? If so, the answer may be in Gregory's book (if it's in English ... ). Or is the uncial numbering an innovation of the Alands'?

Update II: And thanks as well to Stephen C. Carlson of Hypotyposeis for further clarification. I never realized that they re-used the uncial letters if there was no overlap between MS content.

I use the blog engine dasBlog for this site. In browsing their wiki page, it appears that version 1.7 of the dasBlog engine has been released.

I'll be in the process of updating; if things go wonky that is most likely the cause.

Update: Blog engine updating completed. Not much will be visible on the outside, most of the updates are in handling site logs and such, along with some solutions to handle the ever-growing problem of referral spam. You will see a groovy little RSS logo/graphic in your feed readers now. I've wanted this for a long time. Here's the picture:

This is from a small lit sign at a Mexican restaurant in Port Angeles, WA.

Also, there is some very groovy comment spam prevention going on. It uses MTBlacklist and also allows me to specify keywords and such to block. But coolest is the confirmation code. You really need to click the "comment" link below and check it out, even if you don't leave a comment. An image with a code is generated; the value entered in the confirmation box must match the code, otherwise the comment won't be accepted. Very cool.

Another enhancement is the Archive view. I'll be adding a link on the sidebar for this soon. There's also a larger month calendar view, but it looks pretty dumpy so I won't be highlighting it.

All in all, it seems all right, though the updating process was a bit tedious. If you have problems and think it might be due to the updating, please, by all means, drop me an email to let me know (address in bar to right).

Thanks!

In the context of another project I'm working on (personal project, not for Logos; apart from that I'm not ready to announce anything) I wanted to be able to convert Greek Beta Code text into Greek unicode that utilizes the proper polytonic characters. You know, like this:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

So I decided to (finally) roll my own Beta Code to Unicode converter. When I got the component written, it was so cool I figured I had to write a seperate ASP page interface so other folks could use it if they wanted to. There are other converters out there, but they don't interpret Beta Code the way I like to. So this has a few quirks that are all my own, though my quirks tend to get closer to the spec instead of migrate away from it (apart from the 'J' as final sigma). Don't worry, these are all documented on the page.

You'll get three things returned to you:

• UTF8 string in the specified font.
• The text you supplied to the tool.
• Hexadecimal character entities. These can be pasted straight into the source of HTML pages in non-UTF8 contexts (e.g., many third party plain-text editors like TextPad).

Anyway, it's online, fully documented, and ready to rock & roll. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Update: Zack Hubert, fellow Greek text munger of sorts and head dude of the world-famous zhubert.com graces ricoblog with his presence and asks a question 'bout the converter:

Zack: What is your converter written in?
Rico: Javascript running on IIS. It's nothing super complex or tolerant; as I said I wrote it primarily for my own purposes (which, if I'm able to keep on track, I'll blog about in a few weeks).

Zack mentions his approach. Mine is much less refined. Basically, I've got an XML file with mappings from beta code to UTF8 (just the hex numbers — that gives me some freedom on what I actually can spit back to the user). Rather than parse the string from the back and build it as I go, I simply search and replace the string based on the XML mappings. But there's a catch — I always match the longest possible beta code substring first, no matter where it occurs in the string. So, I match '*A(/' before I match 'A(/' or 'A'.  The letters in my mapped hex numbers are lower-case, so I don't have to worry about clobbering mappings I've already slapped in.

Hey, I said it was less refined. I would write it a little differently if I had different constraints (e.g., two-way conversion, multiple inbound fonts), but it works for me. Hey, quit laughin' out there!

Zack — you're in Seattle? If you're ever up north, you should drop me an email and stop by Bellingham on your way to/from wherever. Coffee or whatever is on me.

Update II: James Tauber joins the Greek-geek party with a comment, pointing us to his Python script that does Beta Code to Unicode conversion. His approach is more forgiving than mine, he allows you to do stuff like '*(/A' or '*A(/' and get the same UTF8 bits on the backside. I really ougtha learn me some Python some day (I can follow the code, but I couldn't write it) but I've been far too corrupted by the sheer lovin' messiness of Perl.

BTW, same offer to you James — if you're ever 'up north', let me know you're in the area. Though it's a bit more of a trip for you than it is for Zack.

[Note: the term 'bleg' is a combination of the words “blog” and “beg”, typically used when blog authors make requests of readers.]

As regular ricoblog readers know, I've been working on writing some stuff on the Pastoral Epistles.

I'm still not sure how to label what it is that I'm doing. It isn't a commentary in the traditional sense, though it does share the same basic structure (verse-by-verse organization). Some have suggested the label “Word Studies”, but I dislike that term and don't think it applies to what I'm doing either. I'd thought “exegetical notes” and that's the alternative I'm sticking with at present, though I still don't think it is really descriptive.

At this point, I'm working through the text at the word/phrase level and examining word/phrase occurrences in the NT and also in the LXX, Pseudepigrapha, Apostolic Fathers, Josephus, Philo or whatever other place I can find (either cited or through searching) where it seems the citation helps with understanding the word as it is used in the Pastoral Epistles. A later project, after these notes are complete, will be to use this data while examining the text at a higher level. I'd say 'discourse' level, but I don't plan on doing full-on discourse analysis.

So, I've decided to upload a sample and ask y'all what you think about it. Please feel free to contact me via email at textgeek (at) gmail (dot) com if you have suggestions for a label that I can use to describe this stuff succinctly, or if you have general feedback be it good or bad or in between somewhere. I'm not looking for an editor or nitpicks; there will be plenty of future opportunity in those areas.

This is a PDF doc with notes on 1Ti 3.5. It's 2.5 pages. The English NT translation is that of the ESV.

1 Timothy 3.5 Rough Draft Sample.pdf (53.6 KB)

I post this with the typical author apprehension about others reading his stuff. It's a rough draft and hasn't been edited at all. The first half is a bit more solid than the second half (which needs some work; I threw that part together pretty quickly). And the translations of the LXX need to be checked again. I'll be editing it in a few weeks. But it's a nice little passage that gives some idea of what I'm doing. Hopefully the conventions (bold, italics, single vs. double quotes) will be clear.

Thanks in advance if you're able to give it a look-see and offer some feedback.

To the person who happened across ricoblog while Googling for “who sat on 26 hours on the toilet” — I hope you find what you're looking for.

Well he must not have found it. He just hit again with “sat 26 hours on the toilet + constipation”.

That's a little more disturbing. Whoever you are, I really do hope you find what you're looking for. Perhaps this will help.

If you're curious, ricoblog came up as a link because of my post on the recent find of Luther's commode (Luther's Loo?).

(sorry, couldn't resist)