Last Monday I turned in my final essay for this semester. For the past week I have relaxed by playing video games (a pastime that is notably, and sadly, absent from my life during the semester), reading fiction (David Coe is my newest find), and otherwise taking things easy. Normally at the beginning, middle and end of a semester I talk about what classes I am taking/took and share some of my thoughts on them. Here is my mid-semester summary for Spring 2009. Generally my thoughts at the semester mid-point have carried through to the end of the semester. My specific thoughts follow.

Epigraphic Hebrew – Wow. That’s all I can say about this course (an apparent lie, since I go on to type a paragraph about the course). Tom Petter was great to work with. Having an introduction to inscriptional Hebrew under my belt is great. To top it off, the class was fun as well. The class mostly consisted of translating various inscriptions (including the Mesha Stele). Dr. Petter also expected that Mandy and I would spend some time doing additional research on the various inscriptions. This added to the workload, but payed off by giving a much fuller picture of the current scholarship on various inscriptions (e.g. Kuntillet Ajrud). This was my favorite class over the past semester.

History of Israelite Religions – Much of what I said at the mid-point still holds true for this course. I learned quite a bit, it was fun, and taking a class at Boston University was a different experience. To some extent all this class did was show me how broad, diverse, and multifaceted the study of Israelite Religions really is. This is a good thing, though I might have preferred a more chronologically oriented introduction to Israelite Religions, I also realize that such an approach has its own difficulties. We basically worked our way through Ziony Zevit’s The Religions of Ancient Israel, and then spent some time with Jon Berquist’s Judaism in Persia’s Shadow. The course was a seminar, so each class session included a presentation or two by students. Normally I’m a huge fan of this type of learning. In this case I might have preferred a little more lecture from the professor. Either way, this class was fun, I learned a great deal, and I started to develop a relationship with Dr. Botta which has opened the possibility of taking Middle Egyptian next year (more on that in a subsequent post).

Old Testament Poetical Books – This is the standard GCTS intro to the poetic corpus (for those not in the know: Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, Job, Lamentations and Song of Songs). Since Job is one of my research interests, and a book that I find absolutely fascinating, the course was fun. My final paper, an exegetical study of Job 5.2-7, ended up just shy of 50 pages–so I certainly had the chance to engage with the material. To some extent I feel bad for Dr. Stuart, who has a whole class’ worth of papers to grade. As I said at the mid-semester mark, I would have preferred the class to be a little more demanding, but even so the translation we did was helpful when combined with the classroom discussions of Hebrew grammar. I would have preferred more of such discussions, but I’ll take what I can get.

Targumic Aramaic – This class was my least favorite of the semester. This isn’t to say the course was horrible, but one of my classes has to be my “least favorite.” The class is exactly what the title suggests: Targumic Aramaic. After working my way through a grammar, I translated around 15 chapters of Aramaic. I think I have a fairly decent handle on Targumic Aramaic after this course, though my vocab needs expansion.