i haven't written much about school thus far. i know that school is the reason i'm in Amsterdam, but life in the community has taken up more of my time and my interest, so i've been writing a lot more about that. and my studies started off a bit on the dull side. i've had a couple of seminars, and my homework has consisted solely on putting together a research proposal for my master's degree (to be developed into my Ph.D dissertation). i had come here with the idea of working on the Confessions of Jeremiah (generally they're the parts in Jeremiah 11-20 where Jeremiah talks directly to God and God (sometimes) answers). so i've taken out a couple books on them, read parts of them, thought about my approach, drafted a couple variations of my proposal and it looks good. it's not that i find my dissertation topic boring - i find these texts in the Bible fascinating - and my proposed research is to see how they fit into the whole book of Jeremiah, as well as hopefully looking at how they are read - and i had better not find what i want to spend the next four years of my life studying boring! but the process of writing a proposal (and helping others with their proposals on equally obscure topics :)) without getting the go-ahead on doing serious research was not exactly something that filled me with overflowing excitement and joy. i realize it doesn't help that i have spent the last five years working on two other master degrees, i came here knowing what i want to do (it fits partially with what i'm writing another thesis on right now), and that last May in the midst of finishing a couple of papers, i had written the proposal for that thesis in about a week (albeit with some serious assistance from my thesis supervisor) so this seems a bit long.
but a little over a week ago, a group of us started an extra session with our Old Testament supervisor - learning about his computer program designed for syntactical analysis of texts. and we sat down with coffee together in his office and chatted and played with the computers. and we thought about whether this phrase/sentence fit better with the one right before it or one a little bit beforehand. and although i realize that might immediately sound a bit dull, when you start asking how things fit together in the text, you see what the biggest ideas in a passage are - and what the main point of is. So for example, when you look at Psalm 1 - verse four says, 'the wicked are not so' - the question is, are the wicked not prosperous (from the previous line) or not happy (from the first line)? and if you look at how it is written in Hebrew, the grammar seems to point to the wicked not being happy (although one could argue for not successful) - and then you see the difference between the righteous and the wicked a little differently.
And I love being able to look at a text in the Bible - and take what I know about Hebrew and grammar and how poetry works and be able to see something that we don't immediately see with a quick read in English - things that make you think differently about the world around and about God and serving Him. and so I got incredibly excited about being introduced to a tool that will help me to look closer at the text and know better how to see what the text is saying. i'm sure that the 'gezellig' atmosphere of the class (coffee, only a few students, some chatting about our lives intermixed with learning, and its interactive nature) helped with the excitement, too.
and overall, i am delighted to return to the joy of 'official' scholarly learning.
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