{"id":80,"date":"2005-06-13T23:28:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-14T06:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/?p=80"},"modified":"2005-06-13T23:28:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-14T06:28:00","slug":"ruth-mark-and-old-dates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/13\/ruth-mark-and-old-dates\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruth, Mark, and old dates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t posted in a while.  That&#8217;s in part because I was very busy and then when that ended, I had so much to do to catch up and part of me didn&#8217;t want to &#8220;publicly&#8221; return, lest I find myself with even more work.  But I&#8217;ve decided to stop that (and if you&#8217;re still waiting on a reply or other from me for the last 3 months, well, I still plan to get to it :-)).<\/p>\n<p>I did finish a rather large project last week.  That is, I didn&#8217;t do much on it last week, but I did do the finishing part.  That&#8217;s always a nice feeling.  Ten other large projects are waiting; that&#8217;s not a nice feeling :-).  But it beats being bored.  I suppose at times like these I thank the Lord for those jobs I had in college and grad school where I actually was bored (and hated it).  I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve felt a second of boredom for the last 9 years.<\/p>\n<p>But you&#8217;re not reading for that.  How about various items of interest that I&#8217;ve bumped into lately?<\/p>\n<p>1. Today is Shavuot (or was, the sun has now set).  Last night the moshav had a little celebration at the threshing floor.  Quite appropriate and reminded me of how things might have been in ancient times.  Except that I showed up after a day&#8217;s work in the office and not hot and sweaty after a day out harvesting the fields.  In the synagogues they read Ruth on this holiday, and for the occasion the Jerusalem Post has an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jpost.com\/servlet\/Satellite?pagename=JPost\/JPArticle\/Printer&amp;cid=1118369954825&amp;p=1111893688921\">article on Ruth<\/a>.  Interesting, but I wouldn&#8217;t necessarily agree.  Does make me want to study the book more, which makes it a worthwhile read.<\/p>\n<p>2. Blogger Michael Pahl raves about his experience watching a <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelpahl.blogspot.com\/2005\/06\/gospel-of-mark-unplugged.html\">dramatic one-person performance<\/a> of the Book of Mark.  His comments reveal the value of this sort of thing (for instance, seeing the book as a whole, the way it was written &#8211; we so rarely do that!), and motivate me to think about doing something like this some day.  I&#8217;m not much of an actor, but I don&#8217;t think it would take much acting ability to create a worthy presentation.  There are various sections of Scripture that could work for this.  (If you want to see more, the storyteller&#8217;s website is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.markhisword.org\/\">www.markhisword.org<\/a>; I believe there are others who do this sort of thing).<\/p>\n<p>3. For about a year I&#8217;ve been mentally developing a new website, and for the past few months, a friend has done a lot of work in putting pages together.  The goal is for it to be a counterpart to BiblePlaces.com, in showing the land and people as they were before &#8220;modernization.&#8221;  It&#8217;s the online version of the Historic Views of the Holy Land CD series (but with new material from forthcoming volumes).  My immediate problem is the choice of a good domain name.  I have about 30 I&#8217;ve thought of over the months, but none that seems perfect.  Perfect would be 1) easily remembered, and thus not too long; 2) accurately communicates the content; 3) is appealing to a broader audience (thus &#8220;Bible&#8221; in it is better than &#8220;Palestine&#8221;); 4) is available.  Any ideas?<\/p>\n<p>4. On my recent trip with a group of seminary students, I played one game that lasted about one minute.  It was the only &#8220;betting&#8221; type game of the entire trip.  Of course I lost.  My punishment was a swim in the Sea of Galilee.  With a few things thrown in (or left on).  Some in the group were kind enough to film it, edit it, and post it on the world wide web.  I mention only for those of you who no longer have any respect for me.  It is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zippyvideos.com\/30633737401595.html\">here<\/a>.  For those of you who still hold me in any regard whatsoever, instead read this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/06\/12\/international\/middleeast\/12palm.html?ei=5065&amp;en=4d341f9ae2e00cbf&amp;ex=1119153600&amp;partner=MYWAY&amp;pagewanted=print\">NYTimes article<\/a> on a 2,000-year-old date that sprouted and is growing.  Quite amazing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t posted in a while. That&#8217;s in part because I was very busy and then when that ended, I had so much to do to catch up and part of me didn&#8217;t want to &#8220;publicly&#8221; return, lest I find myself with even more work. But I&#8217;ve decided to stop that (and if you&#8217;re still\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/13\/ruth-mark-and-old-dates\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}