Video: Claiming Your Expertise

I came across this video from Emory University's Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. It is a clip from Carol Newsom who is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I did not have the chance to take a seminar with her (my one regret!) but I did have the chance to work for her for a different project temporarily and all the interactions I had with her were very positive. From everything I've seen and heard she is not only a great scholar (and teacher!, this is an important distinction, one does not follow the other, but my friends in HB have told me what a great teacher she is) but also an awesome and thoughtful person. She came to Candler almost 40 years ago and you can imagine she must have endured a whole lot to get to this point in her career.

I think her short talk is worth listening to and hope it will give everyone resolve to be positive agents of change for the academy as well as strength for their own pursuit of excellence and development as scholars/citizens of this world.

What's up, Michelangelo?

I always wondered why some sculptures of Moses, including this one from Michelangelo, looked like this (do you see what I see?):

Moses has horns!?! I learned today that it was due to a mistranslation of the Latin Vulgate of the theophany described in Exodus 34. Exodus 34:29 reads, "Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God." The word "shone" here is the verb קָרַן which is a very rare verb in the OT (which can cause translation problems as we can see here). In one sense, it can mean "to send out rays" but in another "to display horns." The Latin Vulgate translates this verse as: "cumque descenderet Moses de monte Sinai tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Dei." The verb here is translated as cornuta which is a derivation of the word cornu for "horn." I guess it's too bad for Moses that one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance didn't read Hebrew...