The B-Hebrew Mailing List

B-Hebrew is an e-mail conference of academic professionals, teachers, students, clergy and laity, people of any faith, devoted to a better understanding of the Hebrew Bible. As such we often discuss a variety of topics related to the Biblical languages, the history of the text and its study, the culture of the Ancient Near East, the literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible, and more.

You can join b-hebrew or browse messages that have been posted to b-hebrew by clicking on the following link:

If you prefer, you may also join b-hebrew by sending a mail message to "join-b-hebrew@franklin.oit.unc.edu", eg:

	To:      join-b-hebrew@franklin.oit.unc.edu
	From:    jwrobie@mindspring.com
	Subject: Any subject will do

	Whatever you type here in the body of the message will
	be ignored. The server strips out your email address and
	adds you to the list.

Respectful Discourse

B-Hebrew seeks to foster valuable, interesting exchange among people whose views, backgrounds, and cultures vary widely. We encourage participants to be at least as willing to listen as they are to speak. In our experience, certain rules have been valuable for promoting the kind of exchange we desire.

Although the B-Hebrew forum is willing to entertain a wide range of discussion topics related to Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible, the staff will not tolerate personal attack or disrespect. We are careful to administer this list responsibly. The first two times you post, your message must be approved by a member of the B-Hebrew staff. This allows us to screen out spam and off-topic posts by people who are not familiar with the list. However, it also means that there will be a delay before your message is posted to the list. After the first two posts, your messages are sent directly to the list. Please honor the following guidelines in all your contributions:

• Debate that forces particular faith or doctrinal perspectives onto a reading of the text is not appropriate subject matter for this forum.
• Proselytizing ("seeking to convert someone to a certain religious faith") is also not appropriate. Naturally, each of us will share our own understanding from our own perspective, but this should not be done with the goal of changing other participants.
• Knowledge of Hebrew is assumed, but belittling someone for their lack of skill or ridiculing someone for making a mistake--even a basic one--is unacceptable.
• All list members should be allowed the dignity of being different.
• Discuss passionately, but keep control of your own emotions. Support your counterpoints with evidence, and remember to focus on people's ideas and not the people themselves.
• Consider the possibility of responding directly to a person, rather than to the entire list, if the content might not be of interest to everyone.
• Each of your posts should be signed by name, so members know from whom they are hearing and to whom they might respond

A helpful hint: Write your response, save it and sleep on it. After the emotion of the moment has passed, think about whether your posting will be helpful and appropriate.

Transcription Guidelines

Officially, the B-Hebrew forum transcribes Hebrew in our posts using the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster scheme(MCW) as shown below. In practice, however, the adherence of the list members to the MCW is rather relaxed, so we also assume that members have Hebrew Bibles handy for reference. When an alphabetic sequence is particularly critical to a discussion, members may want to write out the sequence in words, e.g., "The Hebrew spelling of _Adam_ is aleph-qamets-dalet-qamets-mem."