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I should read Simon Holloway’s blog more often. Not only do I enjoy his clearly-put insights, but I managed to miss by over a month the one time he was tagged in a blog meme and decided to tag me in turn. As he puts it:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

Now for him this meant not only quoting from Waltke and O’Connor’s, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, but then discussing the fascinating notion of honorific plurals in Biblical Hebrew (among things).

Not all of us keep quite as neat a desk as Simon, though.

Mine is packed with relics from various moments of the past months of my life, as well as long before that, and some quite useless things indeed. Some day I’ll clean it. (My desk at uni is cleaner, but still piled with papers left by its last occupant!)

Now, the nearest book to me happens to be the university diary I don’t use. While it has more than 123 pages, it doesn’t number them, so I’m defaulting to the second-nearest book, which is The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester.

And thus, after such a long prologue, I’m going to cop out. I’m not up to page 123 yet, and I don’t intend to tell you what it says there until I am. So this post is more an IOU than anything. (If you’re in suspense and want to speed up the reading process, you could try poisoning my food with laxatives.)

First, Keren became USyd’s sample student. Now this:

Trudi told me he was everywhere. But it was hard to avoid a full-page in Honi Soit…

The last two to three weeks have been pretty trying for Israel. But I happen to want to talk about the two weeks before then, just to give a few highlights (fairly extensive highlights?) from my trip to Israel for my brother’s wedding. (more…)