I received in the mail the other day the latest entry in IVP's excellent series of dictionaries: Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, edited by Tremper Longman and Peter Enns. It contains 148 articles by experts on all aspects of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ruth, and Esther.This volume joins two others for the OT:

 

• Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch
• Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books

A volume on the Prophets is also in the works, but no word yet on whether there will be a companion OT Backgrounds conmmentary.The NT side of the series is already complete:

 

• Dictionary of New Testament Background
• Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels
• Dictionary of Paul and His Letters
• Dictionary of Later New Testament & Its Developments

The entire series is well worth having.You can also get all the dictionaries--and more--electronically on the

IVP Essential Reference Collection.

[ht:JT]

El mundialmente famoso Partenón de la Acrópolis de Atenas será sometido a trabajos de restauración a partir de 2009 y verá así su fachada occidental oscurecida por andamios durante tres años, dijeron funcionarios. 

El trabajo se centrará principalmente en la reparación de los daños causados por el levantamiento griego contra la dominación otomana en 1821, cuando la fachada fue dañada por unos 700 agujeros de bala, dijo el arquitecto Manolis Korres. 

La emblemática fachada occidental también ha sufrido los estragos de la humedad, que es tres veces mayor que la experimentada por las otras fachadas debido a su posición en relación con el sol. 

El Partenón sufrió también daños en los terremotos en 1981 y 1999. 

La decisión de iniciar un nuevo programa de restauración fue adoptada por el Consejo Superior de Arqueología, que también decidió, después de algún debate, el transporte de varios de los frisos de la fachada al nuevo Museo de la Acrópolis para su seguridad. 

Las piezas serán reemplazadas por copias en el Partenón.

The lamb comes out tasting absolutely delicious if you get the heat right. You get a nice brown glazing and tasty rosy meat inside. To get this effect you have to make sure the heat is hot enough to brown the meat but not so hot it'll singe the mint. The mint and lemon makes a really nice flavouring and once you deglaze the pan with the lemon juice, its nice if you spoon the sauce over the potatoes and meat it brings the dish together perfectly.

El Codex Sinaiticus es una Biblia manuscrita del siglo IV que incluye la copia conservada más antigua del Nuevo Testamento. Sus dimensiones son de 33,5 centímetros de ancho por 37,5 de alto y fue encontrado en 1844 por el teólogo Konstantin von Tischendorf en una papelera del Monasterio de Santa Catalina. Los monjes autorizaron al teólogo a llevarse 43 páginas de pergamino a Leipzig.

Much like the fasolakia and yemista, this meal is quintessentially summer and probably my most favorite. Fresh eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes from local gardens/farms taste so sweet! This is another olive oil drencher, but since I fry the eggplant and potatoes in an olive oil/canola oil blend they usually absorb a lot of oil that way, so I don't need as much in the final pot. Everything in tonight's meal was local except for the oil and garlic.

Μελιτζάνες και Πατάτες Τηγανιτές (Eggplants and Potatoes Fried)

• 1 large eggplant
• 2-3 medium potatoes (peeled)
• 2-3 ripe tomatoes (skinned)
• 3 garlic cloves (minced)
• olive oil
• canola oil
• mint leaves
• salt and pepper

Slice up eggplant into strips and potatoes into fries. In a wide sauce pan pour olive oil about an inch deep and heat. Fry potatoes first in batches and then fry eggplant strips. Set aside.

In a separate pot, saute garlic in about 2 tablespoons olive oil, then roughly chop up tomatoes right into pot (to ensure juices are not lost). Cover and let sauce simmer until the tomatoes are soft. Then add the fried potatoes, eggplant and chopped up mint leaves, gently stir together. Cover and let it all simmer together for a few minutes to allow all the flavors to meld.

Serve it with a chunk of feta and a couple slices of rustic bread-YUM!

The Saints Helen and Constantine Greek Orthodox church is where Mike's mom grew up, along with all the Greek family on her side. Her father (my husband's "papouli" or Greek grandfather) and mother (Mike's "yiayia" or Greek grandmother) were members, and volunteered every year for the festival before yiayia passed away.

There was Greek dancing (the zorba dance among others was performed and plates were broken -OPA!) and gyros, athenian chicken, and the ouzo was flowing like water. I got a little choked up watching everyone from middle aged ladies to cassocked priests to toddlers putting arms around each others shoulders and performing the step-oriented dances while smiling and laughing.

It was beautiful to see traditions and customs from a culture so old to be carried out and celebrated in the American midwest by people so far removed from their origins. It wrenches my heart a little to realize that I had no such enrichment as a child. My father, when prompted to answer about our ancestors or heritage, would respond "we're Americans" and huff off to smoke his pipe and watch Rush Limbaugh.

My mother would tell me about her family's names, and what country they came from, but that was about all the information I could get from either of them.

I longed for that sort of information to be passed on to me, as a kid. Somehow it seemed that knowing where your ancestors came here from, essentially where you came from, made a person special. The world is a fascinating place, and the different cultures that have sprung up all over the globe really do fascinate me. But living in a place where so many of those cultures have come together and been re-written, disenfranchised, or smothered with non-regional dialect and behavior gets depressing sometimes. I feel, as an American, that whatever culture we do have (hotdogs? baseball? apple pie?) is so vague and commecialized that it lacks that ancient feel, that sacredness of tradition most of the time.

Sure, I wipe away a tear when I can afford to go to a live sporting event where the anthem is sung. Every fourth of July I think of my father and his father and the veterans and soldiers and philosophers who made this country what it is by their thinking and common sense and bloodshed. But every single one of those nostalgic experiences is tempered by the knowledge that this country we live in, that allows us the freedoms we have and the quality of life we expect these days, wasn't always ours. Someone in my family, many someones, at some point decided that America sounded like a great place to be. Somebody made the journey from wherever they were to here, and toughed it out as an immigrant with a family. Whoever those someone's were, they had traditions from somewhere else ingrained into them. They knew a place that was before America, before capitalism, and before multi-media centers and $8.00 bottles of water and $26 folding chairs on the lawn at an outdoor rock concert.

I want to know what those traditions were. What blood flows in my veins, and why do I fight a lump in my throat every time I hear a bagpipe blowing? How in the hell did I start to crave sauerkraut on my bratwurst?

America is beautiful, and there are really only a handful of other places I'd be willing to live at this point in my life... but I'm going to do my best to teach my boys about the rich cultures of their ancestors, even if I have to treat it like a research assignment.

News has been circulating for several days about it so I thought I would go ahead and mention it here.  So check it out and bookmark it!  www.codexsinaiticus.org

Note: if the site doesn't initially work it probably means they're still working on it -- it's the launch day!  So try refreshing your page if it doesn't work at first.

The Codex Sinaiticus Bible, a fourth century CE handwritten copy of the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, is coming online. On July 24, 2008, the Codex Sinaiticus Project was set to place the Book of Psalms (Tehillim in Hebrew) and the Gospel of Mark online in a view-only format with an online reader like Amazon and some online versions of print publications.

As of this morning, Jerusalem time, all that is available online is an image of a sample of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations (Eicha in Hebrew).

The Times of London has an interesting piece on the "Indiana Jones" angle - where the manuscript was found, how it has been scattered around the world, and how the British Library has been able to piece it together for online presentation.

Some group of jackasses decided to patch together the oldest remaining bible in existence, the Codex Sinaiticus, digitize the pages and re-assemble them online for everyone to study. How old and cool is this book? The The Codex Sinaiticus Project website lays it all out.

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript - the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity - is of supreme importance for the history of the book.

More info from the Codex Sinaiticus website:

The Codex Sinaiticus Project is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript.

Way to ruin my biblical slacking the Codex Sinaiticus Project! Now I gotta' bone up on my ancient Greek and get one of those nifty new book readers from Amazon to dig into this puppy when it's fully released... I'm gonna' find me the lost treasure of Jesus' gold!

If you are in the mood for bbq but tired of the same old chicken and steak, Sunday Dish has a Greek inspired bbq idea you might like.  Opa!

As a 15 year old (more years in the past than I'd like to admit), I went to Greece as part of a high school trip. While I had travelled abroad a number of times before, this was my first visit to Europe and the history, people and food (yes, even then), perhaps predictably, made a lasting impression. While I've done quite a bit more travelling since then, I'm not sure I'll have such a strong memory of Europe as the first night at our hotel on Parthenonos street, with the namesake monument lit up and viewed perfectly from our room's balcony like a floating home for the gods. Our late dinner comprised of rather exotic fare for a young Canadian lad - moussaka (delicious!) and baklava - helping to take some of the sting out of a long and delayed trip.

Fast forward to a recent trip to Dio Deka, a rather well-received, modern and pricey Greek restaurant in upscale Los Gatos, CA. Instead of the sloppy, primally satisfying street food served nightly in the Plaka, the owners wanted a place where Greek cuisine could be experienced through a highly refined lens. The tzatziki appetizer resembles not so much Monet - broad-brush impressionist tzatziki such as that I make at home (a handful of this, a pinch of that) - and much more Ansel Adams, made with great clarity, executed with precision, and carefully calculated to hit doubles (if not home runs) with American diners.

The aforementioned tzatziki had clearly been made with yogurt painstakingly squeezed of all water, leaving behind a very thick spread that more than slightly reminded me of herbed cream cheese. It was very tasty, but was clearly lacking garlic (as the foodosopher pointed out about two milliseconds after it hit his taste buds) and the normal yogurt tang that one would otherwise expect. The popular lamb meatball appetizer, each skewered on a small stick of rosemary, were similarly well-executed, though the sauce was a bit non-descript.

The terrific grilled calamari salad, produced from the mesquite grill which constantly belched smoke into the large ventilation system, had beautiful char marks while being impressively tender.

This same grill produces the famous Dio Deka lamb chops, three to a plate and cooked, after some negotiation, to a tip-top perfect medium-rare (which required asking for it rare-to-medium-rare). Some have criticized these lamb chops for lacking "flavor", by which I think they mean that characteristic lambiness that causes some to shy away. I'm not in that camp, as I prefer it when the meat expresses its origin sotto voce, rather than yelling in my ear, so I found the subtle flavor rather delicious. The double-thick Berkshire pork chop was similarly flawlessly executed - it was cooked exactly to the knife edge between underdone and overdone that is often so elusive with pork. The accompaniments with these dishes were exactly that: no more, no less. One entree, a braised lamb shank with orzo, didn't come from the grill. The meat itself was braised lovingly to falling-apartness, but the orzo was far too rich with butter and cheese that made the meat seem lean (not an easy task). We did not opt for any desserts, but they certainly looked to be great crowd-pleasers. The "Greek beignets" seemed to appear at every table, although I'm not so sure they would be ten percent as popular if the menu read "Greek doughnut" instead. The wine list was quite strong, even by Bay Area standards. There are a good two to three dozen wines available by the glass, with a handful of interesting wines interspersed among the sea of populist choices.

The owners have succeeded - wildly, by all appearances - in their quest to bring updated Greek cuisine to the well-to-do masses. However, this success comes at the expense of the Greek-ness of the whole experience. If one wanted to be cynical, one might even claim that Dio Deka is really an American steakhouse with a definite but carefully-measured Greek twist. The menu seemingly explores a rather small fraction of Greek cuisine in order to ensure that the food retains a familiarity for American palates (although further visits might be needed to fully confirm this - the restaurant for some reason has taken the menu off their website, at least from what I can tell). This populist path means that it is a very useful place for parties with less-adventurous eaters who nevertheless want to experience something different. The noise level was a bit high, though, so don't take the grandparents from Iowa unless you're sure they're up for it. The strength of the restaurant are the dishes from the grill station which were all executed with GPS precision and are the reason to go back. It won't replace in my heart my first late-night lamb souvlaki, however imperfect it was, but not for a lack of trying. It's not so much food that has been dumbed-down as food calibrated perfectly by their shrewd business plan.

So one day on my lunch break I tried it and since then I have been spending waaay too much money on it ever since. Fage which is a staple in greek diets, has a special way of being strained that makes it look and taste like yogurt made with whole milk and a billion calories only its fat free and like 80 calories. Its super creamy and mild and totally amazing with fruit or honey. It sounds silly to obsess over something like yogurt but seriously if you try it you will  see why it has a cult following. The only bad side is a single serving cup costs around 2 bucks and like a 5 serving tub will run you almost 6, pricey but delicious.

Another part of the article that drew my attention was McMurtry's act of discovery in writing the characters he sings. The act of discovery, to me, is one of the reasons story-telling is still around. Not only does the listener/reader learn about the characters (and hopefully themselves) from the story, but the story-teller learns to find something like meaning in the randomness around us. It is the purest part of story-telling, the truth at the core of all art. So why, if discovery helps all involved and characters are such a staple of our perception of the world, don't we typically hear more music with a focus on the characters involved? Is it the massive amounts of vague nonsense being spewed through our radios? Is it a lack of attention spans long enough to allow for full character development? Whatever the reasoning is, I think we, especially in the art world, need to start working against this overflow of vague ideas and start working toward something definable, something tangible. I'm tired of songs that rely on music videos to provide meaning for abstract lyrics. If your song is about love, show me the lovers, why they argue, what they do when no one is around! I want you to tell me about myself through other people, not draw indiscernible figures in the air that melt as soon as the music fades! Specifics are the key to good art -- we cannot connect to someone who is "Everyman" (thus, the reason why the Everyman plays died hundreds of years ago). So why are we still inundated with music that has the "I and you" format -- this vague set of undefined people who apparently interact in everything from love-making to break-ups to drug trips? Why are we surrounded by art that doesn't do the work, in fact depends on the listener to do the work for the artist? The intent of all art is to make the viewer/listener think (thereby working), but when I have to fill in the blank you didn't even consider? No way. And pop artists wonder why people refuse to pay for a CD of tracks that mean nothing more than "I have a FABULOUS publicist."

That James McMurtry, though? Expect to see that disc in my collection. Any artist who still does his share of the work is worth paying for in my book.

That's right. Fat. It's the best part of the meal. I made dinner for brothers and I tonight. I used recipes from my new Greek cookbook. I made fried vegetables with yogurt sauce, anoghia lamb and apples stuffed with dried fruit. Now, that seems all innocent. But really, what's so good about fried veggies, spaghetti cooked in lard and apples drizzled in oil and butter. Mmm, best dinner ever.

So if anyone needs a Greek dinner made? I'll come over. Don't expect it to get done fast though. I started making dinner at 5 and it wasn't done till 7. Just thought I'd let you know.