IBEX Students, Put Yourself on the Map!

By | November 3, 2005
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I’ve long wanted to do something like this and today I found the easy way to do it. The LangaList points out “Frappr!“, which allows individuals to create a “group map.” I have started one for IBEX students and added myself to start. This is more properly an item for an IBEX Alumni Newsletter but I don’t know when I’m going to do the next one of those, so I figure we can get it started here. The rules are these:

1. Only add yourself if you were at IBEX for a semester (not for a short-term program). Any may look at the map, of course.

2. If you’re in a secret location, this may not be ideal for you. Perhaps you can find a general location that will work. I didn’t include the moshav because it’s not listed; Jerusalem is close enough.

3. Married female alumnae – if you can include your maiden name, that will help more of us to know who you are.

4. You can include your semester if you want.

5. If you are in contact, tell other IBEXers. It will be interesting to see where everyone is!

The address is an easy one to remember:

http://www.frappr.com/ibex

Check out our Frappr!

My Car is Worth $100,000

By | November 3, 2005
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Actually, if I advertised it for sale, I would get about 7000 NIS ($1500). But if I priced it part by part, it would be worth a fortune. I know this because this week I replaced the headlight switch ($400) and the washer fluid pump ($100). For years I have needed to replace the exhaust manifold ($1000), but have managed without. Last year I replaced the engine ($2000). And there are lots of other parts. Altogether, I am sure that it would raise my net worth significantly. Maybe I could use that argument to qualify for a larger loan using the car as collateral? Or I could just sell the vehicle one part at a time.

Don't Come Back to Israel (Go to Jordan)

By | November 2, 2005
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After spending a semester in Israel, many students have a love for the land and a desire to return. Exactly how to do that isn’t always clear. One option that I recommend is to study the “other half” of the land, what is today the country of Jordan. You really don’t understand how integral that “half” is until you spend time learning about it (just as most people don’t understand the value of knowing the geography of Israel before they come). IBEX used to offer a course on Jordan, but it’s been many years since we have. This wouldn’t be ideal for returners anyway, because it was a regular semester course. A better way is a short-term program focused on Jordan.

The Biblical Archaeology Society is now promoting their “Jordan In Depth” tour. You can see the itinerary, and if this is your only option, I don’t doubt that it would be helpful. But it’s certainly not the best, nor is it the best value for your money. You get 8 days touring the land at a cost of $3700 from New York.

A better option is the Jordan program offered by the University of the Holy Land and taught by Dr. Ginger Caessens. This program is about 13 days of touring at a cost of $1575 (without airfare). If you can get airfare for $1100 (from NY), you save $1000 and get 5 extra days. And 2 credits for grad school or college.

I have participated in the UHL Jordan program and it is excellent in every way. The professor has a thorough knowledge of the biblical connections that the BAS program doesn’t have. You can see this just by looking at what the BAS itinerary doesn’t include: the biblical sites of Ramoth Gilead, Jabesh Gilead, Penuel, Mahanaim, Sukkot, Heshbon, Dibon, Ezion Geber area, and many other smaller sites. To me, these skipped sites are what biblical Jordan is all about. Any tour of Jordan will take you to Petra and Jerash.

P.S. I, of course, get nothing from promoting this. One of the reasons the BAS program is $1000 more for 5 days less is because BAS is taking their cut for promoting the program and I’m advertising the UHL program for free (and without anyone asking). The UHL program also knows how to eliminate multiple layers of middlemen and that cuts the cost significantly.

Don't Return Artifacts to Egypt

By | November 1, 2005
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I’m not going to take the time now to make my case for why I don’t think artifacts like the Rosetta Stone and the Bust of Nefertiti should be returned to Egypt. There are many reasons, but here’s one, revealed in this article in today’s NY Times: the deplorable state of the Egyptian Museum. The article focuses on the objects stored in the basement, but I daresay that the situation is not much better on the display floors. Here’s one quote:

Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling.

Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics. Six hundred coffins and 170 mummies have been found so far. No one knows what may have been stolen over the years. Last year, officials reported that 38 golden bracelets from Roman times had vanished from the basement, apparently six years earlier.

“It is an accumulation of 100 years of neglect,” said Dr. Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University who took a recent tour of the basement. “It is not appropriate for a country like Egypt to have such miserable storage for its history.”

And this:

Last year, Dr. Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent in a team of curators to do a complete inventory. It was a slow process in very difficult working conditions. There is little ventilation, poor lighting and dust, lots and lots of dust. So far 22,000 items have been inventoried – about 20 percent of what is actually in the basement, said Sabah Abdel Razek, the curator overseeing the job.

The team never knows what it will find when a crate is cracked open. In one, Ms. Abdel Razek said, the team discovered parts of the palace of the Pharaoh Merenptah, which dates to the 19th Dynasty (1307 B.C. to 1196 B.C.) and was unearthed by a team from the University of Pennsylvania around 1915. Part of the palace was taken back to Philadelphia, where it remains on display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, but the museum had no idea that other pieces of the palace were crated in the basement, she said.

No one should be asking museums to return artifacts when Egypt cannot manage what it has.

(HT: Egyptology News)

A Muslim View of the Temple Mount

By | October 31, 2005
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WorldNetDaily has an interview with the vice-chairman of the Islamic Movement about the Temple Mount. If you haven’t read much about the Muslim view of the Temple Mount, then it’s a worthwhile read. In short, any Jewish claim to the Temple Mount is denied because it is alleged that Al-Aqsa existed there since the time of Adam and therefore Solomon’s Temple never did. It’s a classic case of historical revisionism, with major implications. At the end of the interview, the Muslim calls for evangelical Christians to support his side. Here is where he misses the obvious: to whatever degree Christians might empathize with Muslims and their situations, they will be turned off by such a blatant denial of incontrovertible historical facts.

Me and my Grandpa

By | October 30, 2005
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I was hunting down a photo when I came across this one. It’s me and my Grandpa in Georgia when I was about 3 years old. He passed away a few years ago, but before he did I was able to fly out to see him with Mark (who was 2 at the time). He was a general contractor.

A Gallon in Israel

By | October 29, 2005
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The price of a gallon of important fuels in Israel:

Gasoline: $5.13
Milk: $3.37
Ice Cream: $17.14

Gasoline used to be closer to $4/gallon, but has gone up with the price of a barrel of oil. Milk is cheaper than I thought, and is fixed by the government. Except for the special treat of chocolate milk, we don’t drink milk apart from breakfast cereal. The ice cream isn’t the cheapest you can find here, but it’s the cheapest that tastes like ice cream. Fancy kinds like Ben and Jerry’s are of course much higher. A big difference between Israel and America – there are no coupons or buy two for less specials, and competition doesn’t seem to be much of a factor (in bringing prices down).

Which Bible Translation is Better?

By | October 28, 2005
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One of the blogs that I follow casually is the Better Bibles Blog. Ever since I was the only one carrying a non-NASB translation around TMC (and later TMS), I have had to defend my choice of preferred translation. Today I see a post about the ESV and TNIV. I use neither, but both have passionate advocates and attackers, especially in my circles. My prediction is that the ESV will replace the NASB as translation of choice at TMC/TMS by the end of the decade. And the translation principles adopted by the TNIV committee led the school president once to encourage all of the students to mail their NIV Bibles back to Zondervan. John Piper loves the ESV and slams the NIV. Consequently students may tend to choose one over the other solely on the basis of their teacher’s advice, without actually looking at them. Thus I think the following blog by a Bible translator from a different circle might be helpful to some.

If we could decide the merits of the ESV vs. the TNIV solely on the quality of their website technologies and blog currency, the ESV would win hands down. The ESV Internet team is superb. (I wish the English in the ESV were the same; much of it is rather strange.)

Yesterday, however, the TNIV blog posted notice of a new Flash presentation of the TNIV on the Zondervan website. Turn your speakers up and click on the titled boxes on the flash screen.

If you are more concerned about literary quality than technological superiority, my own quantified studies demonstrate that the translation quality of the TNIV is superior to that of the ESV. And as an editor and longtime student of English, I can also easily affirm that the literary quality of English in the TNIV surpasses that of the ESV.

I share this not as a final answer but with the hope that it will encourage some to think more about it before deciding. Maybe too it is possible that both have their strengths and these should be recognized by both sides.

Free Audio Files of Mahaney and Piper conferences

By | October 27, 2005
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There are a number of interesting items in a recent email from Sovereign Grace Ministries. They (finally) have a new CD available: Worship God Live. The leader of Sovereign Grace is C. J. Mahaney and he and his wife recently gave a series of talks at the church pastored by Lance Quinn, formerly of GCC. The church has made these all available:

C.J. Mahaney
Sex, Romance and the Glory of God – Part 1 (MP3)
Sex, Romance and the Glory of God – Part 2 (MP3)
Message to Men (MP3)
Humility: True Greatness (MP3)
The Cross Centered Life (MP3)
The Soul of Modesty (MP3) | Modesty Heart Check (PDF)

Carolyn Mahaney
Message to Women: What Christian Wives Need to Know (MP3)
True Beauty (MP3)
A Woman’s Beauty Regimen (MP3)
What To Do About the Things We Can’t Do Anything About (MP3)

I must say how much I appreciate ministries who provide mp3 files free of charge. This is especially valuable for those of us scattered around the world.

If you missed the mp3 files for the recent Piper conference on “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God,” you’ll find them all here (free). Previous conferences are no longer posted (as far as I can tell), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they make a book from the conference, which means that the audio files won’t be available forever. Grab them now.