Sometimes you forget how good a book can be. I last read à Kempis' Imitation of Christ probably 10 years ago. Last night, for some reason, I picked it up off the shelf and flicked right to the below entry and was blown away. Note that versions of this book are available in cheap paperback. You can also find a version online at the CCEL, which is where the below text (book 3, chapter 48) comes from.

O MOST happy mansion of the city above! O most bright day of eternity, which night does not darken, but which the highest truth ever enlightens! O day, ever joyful and ever secure, which never changes its state to the opposite! Oh, that this day shine forth, that all these temporal things come to an end! It envelops the saints all resplendent with heavenly brightness, but it appears far off as through a glass to us wanderers on the earth. The citizens of heaven know how joyful that day is, but the exiled sons of Eve mourn that this one is bitter and tedious.

The days of this life are short and evil, full of grief and distress. Here man is defiled by many sins, ensnared in many passions, enslaved by many fears, and burdened with many cares. He is distracted by many curiosities and entangled in many vanities, surrounded by many errors and worn by many labors, oppressed by temptations, weakened by pleasures, and tortured by want.

Oh, when will these evils end? When shall I be freed from the miserable slavery of vice? When, Lord, shall I think of You alone? When shall I fully rejoice in You? When shall I be without hindrance, in true liberty, free from every grievance of mind and body? When will there be solid peace, undisturbed and secure, inward peace and outward peace, peace secured on every side? O good Jesus, when shall I stand to gaze upon You? When shall I contemplate the glory of Your kingdom? When will You be all in all to me? Oh, when shall I be with You in that kingdom of Yours, which You have prepared for Your beloved from all eternity?

I am left poor and exiled in a hostile land, where every day sees wars and very great misfortunes. Console my banishment, assuage my sorrow. My whole desire is for You. Whatever solace this world offers is a burden to me. I desire to enjoy You intimately, but I cannot attain to it. I wish to cling fast to heavenly things, but temporal affairs and unmortified passions bear me down. I wish in mind to be above all things, but I am forced by the flesh to be unwillingly subject to them. Thus, I fight with myself, unhappy that I am, and am become a burden to myself, while my spirit seeks to rise upward and my flesh to sink downward. Oh, what inward suffering I undergo when I consider heavenly things; when I pray, a multitude of carnal thoughts rush upon me!

O my God, do not remove Yourself far from me, and depart not in anger from Your servant. Dart forth Your lightning and disperse them; send forth Your arrows and let the phantoms of the enemy be put to flight. Draw my senses toward You and make me forget all worldly things. Grant me the grace to cast away quickly all vicious imaginings and to scorn them. Aid me, O heavenly Truth, that no vanity may move me. Come, heavenly Sweetness, and let all impurity fly from before Your face.

Pardon me also, and deal mercifully with me, as often as I think of anything besides You in prayer. For I confess truly that I am accustomed to be very much distracted. Very often I am not where bodily I stand or sit; rather, I am where my thoughts carry me. Where my thoughts are, there am I; and frequently my thoughts are where my love is. That which naturally delights, or is by habit pleasing, comes to me quickly. Hence You Who are Truth itself, have plainly said: “For where your treasure is, there is your heart also.” If I love heaven, I think willingly of heavenly things. If I love the world, I rejoice at the happiness of the world and grieve at its troubles. If I love the flesh, I often imagine things that are carnal. If I love the spirit, I delight in thinking of spiritual matters. For whatever I love, I am willing to speak and hear about.

Blessed is the man who for Your sake, O Lord, dismisses all creatures, does violence to nature, crucifies the desires of the flesh in fervor of spirit, so that with serene conscience he can offer You a pure prayer and, having excluded all earthly things inwardly and outwardly, becomes worthy to enter into the heavenly choirs.

Brandon Wason (Novum Testamentum) has posted some photos from SBL. He's even got one of him with me.

But the all-time best photo from the SBL conference is below. Walking back from Monday night dinner in Chinatown (Mmmmmmm ... crispy duck!), I noticed a particular store. I knew I needed to have a photo taken in front of it the next morning. I borrowed Bob's camera, and Eli obliged in snapping the classic pic:

How can this not be the best picture from the recent conference?

I happened acorss the Posner Memorial Library collection at Carnegie Mellon University. They've digitised (photographed) a bunch of stuff.

One of the items is Quinque libri legis Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numeri, Deuteronomium with a date of 1539-1544. My Latin ... well, I don't really have any Latin, but I seem to be able to make out something about five books of the law (the book names gave it away, I know).

The text is in Hebrew. Here's the title page, where you can see the standard "Ex officina Roberti Stephani, typographi Regii." ("from the office of Robertus Stephanus, typographer to the king"?) which is the same line that appears on the title page of the 1550 edition of the so-called "Textus Receptus".

Here's the first page of Genesis. Now my Hebrew is only marginally better than my Latin (which isn't saying much) but one interesting item to note is that the first word of the book is printed as the title, the balance of the book takes off from there. From what I understand, this is standard for Hebrew editions (to use the first word as the title).

Typographically, the text is cool because you can see use of wide letters to justify the left margin.

So, my questions (if anyone happens to know):

1. The Posner Library only has the Torah. Did Bobby-Steve publish the whole Hebrew Bible?

2. Anyone know the basis of this edition? Surely it isn't L. Is it the same basis as the Ben Chayyim 1524-25 edition?

3. Does this edition contain anything textually significant?

4. What is the relation of this edition to the King James Version Old Testament?

This week's Religion Bookline (from Publishers Weekly) has a short article about the launching of IVP Academic.

It's about time for IVP to make this sort of stuff a formal division with a focus. I've enjoyed several academically-geared titles from IVP in the past and am looking forward to more good stuff from them in the years to come.

I picked up a flyer from IVP on this at the ETS conference, though I can't find the content of that flyer on their web site.

Today is Ralph the Sacred River's one-year birthday.

If you don't read Ed Cook's stuff, you should. Even though I'm not in the realm of Aramaic studies, I learn from reading Ralph.

One of my favorite Ralph posts to date: Some Lines from Milosz.

The NETS (New English Translation of the Septuagint) provisional translation page has been updated again.

Note that 1-4 Kingdoms are now available, and a few others have been updated (e.g., Esther, I think).

Grab the PDF while you can.

I've added a few new blogs to the blogroll over the past few days.

First is Yasmin Finch's blog, yasminfinch. This has been discussed a bit in the biblioblogosphere, so it seems appropriate to add it and make mention. Be sure to check it out.

Second, I've received email from Dr. Claude Mariottini (as has Christopher Heard) announcing his blog on topics related to the Hebrew Bible. I've added his blog to my blogroll. Dr. Mariottini appears to write longer entries every few days. He is also working on a commentary of 1 & 2 Chronicles to be published in Hendrickson's NIBC series.

As for me: Time to dig back into the Pastorals. SBL is over. The Thanksgiving holiday has passed. And I've got a decent amount of work to do still.

First, it's back to business. Enough biblioblog navel-gazing; let's do some work! In an effort to move the conversation from existential queries and criticisms, I point you to PastoralEpistles.com and some non-canonical citations relevant to 1Ti 4.16 that I've compiled since the conference. There's a seven page PDF file. The phrase "you will save both yourself and your hearers" is the subject. Similar phrasing/concepts occur in other early documents. So what does it mean? What does it point to? How should this be exegeted? That's what I'm looking into. Check out the citations; if you have further items to add please send along the citations.

How's that for "open scholarship"?

Now, since I was at the biblioblogger session at SBL, I feel I need to weigh in on the latest conversation regarding male and female in the biblioblogosphere. I'm not planning to say more on this, so here it goes:

I think I'm proof that what has been called "biblioblogdom" isn't an exclusive club of some sort. I'm not a professor or instructor at a university, college or seminary. I hold no graduate degrees. I am not currently purusing a graduate degree.

I'm just a guy interested in this stuff who likes to write, who finds value in blogging as a method to work out thoughts. The "biblioblogosphere" is a bonus for me in that folks who have degrees, and who teach, and who know much more than I do actually read what I write, offer feedback, and gently guide me along if I'm off the track -- or that I can interact with if I think I'm right and they're wrong.

I think that to "make it" in the biblioblogosphere, one has to have some shameless self-promotion going. I really don't think it is a male/female thing.

When ricoblog had just started, nobody but friends of mine read it. Every now and then, however, I'd write something that I thought would fit in the discussion on other blogs. So, I'd (hesitantly) send an email to that blog's author pointing them to what I'd written. If they linked, great. If not, that was fine too. At least they'd check it out.

Stephen C. Carlson (Hypotyposeis) linked to some early stuff of mine on the Apostolic Fathers after I sent him an email. I notified Mark Goodacre of some later posts, and then later Jim Davila found me from there, I think. It wasn't anything magical, it was just making folks aware of work I'd done that I thought was relevant to what they were doing.

Also, if you read biblioblogs and have a blog -- don't be afraid to comment and leave a link to your own blog in the comment. If someone likes your comment, they'll check out your stuff. If I think a commenter adds something to the conversation, I like to update the post to point folks to the comments, when I do this I typically link directly to the person's blog in question.

Additionally, keep a blogroll. Use a service like Bloglines (or whatever) to manage it. List the blogs you like to read. Many bloggers also list blogs that they know have linked to them. That's what I try to do. If you've linked to me or would like to have your blog listed in my generic blog roll, please send an email. I zap through the list a few times a week to see what's going on and to see if blogs I don't regularly read have any interesting posts. Getting in these blogrolls increases your chance of traffic stumbling upon your site (not to mention higher Technorati rankings ... )

In short, there's a lot of information and links floating around out there. If you're blogging and lamenting the fact that your posts aren't magically picked up by other blogs, try either emailing the blog author or commenting or trackbacking. Announce your blog via email to bloggers you like to read and ask to be placed on their blogrolls if they see fit. They may ignore you, but most (that I know) will check out the link and see what's up.

A final caveat: when commenting on a blog post, be sure to add something to the discussion. If you just say, "yeah, and see my blog too, it's really good!" you will probably not be mentioned further or highlighted for further linking.

Ok, that's it. Now, let's get to work. Who's doing what? And when do we have to have abstracts submitted for SBL International and for the 2006 meeting in DC?

Update (2005-11-28): Rick Mansfield (This Lamp) adds a comment on the 1Ti 4.16 bit above. Additionally, Eric Sowell (The Coding Humanist) blogs some thoughts. Thanks for the input, guys. I should say, however, that I'm less interested in the Greek grammar/syntax and more interested in the phrase itself as similar phrases are found in other writings, both before and after the Pastorals. I'm curious as to use of the "both to yourself and to your hearers/readers" and similar sorts of things. Was this common? Was Paul using a catch-phrase of some sort to score rhetorical points? Or did later writers (e.g. homilist of 2Clement) pick up on Paul and use similar phrasing for similar reasons? (Don't mind me, just thinking aloud ... )