As you have noticed, I have renovated the structure of our forums. Since I am closing the "General Discussion" forum, and since we will want to continue the discussion and evaluation of our forums, I have moved this topic to what I consider to be the "appropriate" forum.
I will entertain any critique and constructive criticism of the new structure. I'm sure that we'll want to refine it.
I have made a number of policy changes while renovating:
The charter of Biblical Hebrew has been expanded to include not just the Hebrew Bible, but all of "classical" Hebrew, as defined by The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew.
I have chosen what I hope are unambiguous titles and descriptions for the various subject areas. Did I get it right? Did I cover everything? The idea was that a "General Discussion" forum should no longer be necessary; in theory, a post that doesn't fit any of the subfora is outside the charter of our forum.
Forums need a constituency of members interested in that topic and are willing to post and interact with each other. If fora remain unused, then the question needs to be asked: do we need it? do we need to advertise and recruit those who are interested? If so, how do we proceed?
If you're unsure where to place your post, just put somewhere. I'll evaluate it and move it, if necessary. It might also be necessary to adjust the forums and their definitions.
Kirk, as far as I’ve been able to see, textual criticism remains an off limit topic – as it was before the subfora were created. Am I missing something or am I correct that the topic continues to be out of bounds?
As is clear from previous posts in this thread, at least a couple of us have some interest in textual criticism. Having said that, I understood why there were reasons for the original decision not to permit discussions of textual criticism.
Ah. An oversight. I didn't edit the Hebrew Bible forum description.
Now the question: do I create a new forum just for TC? Would there be enough traffic to justify it? But we could try it and see. I would be of a mind to put it as a subforum of the Hebrew Bible. It would be up to you and the others interested in TC to encourage others to join in.
Thanks. It took Friday and the weekend to get this far.
You've noticed that I'm moving posts and topics around to match our new forum schema. It's going to take a couple of weeks for that. Then I'll go to work setting up the new forums, e.g., first posts with info about the topic like where to get texts, grammars, lexica, etc.
Kirk Lowery wrote:To recapitulate: do we just allow TC in the Hebrew Bible forum, or give it it's own place?
Kirk, my initial reaction is to allow TC to occur in the Hebrew Bible subforum. In the past it has surreptitiously but naturally snuck in as part of a more general discussion around a particular issue.
If allowing this to occur creates problems over the next few months, it would presumably be possible to segregate TC into its own subforum in the future.
Liking the new separation of the forum - makes it easier to know exactly what may be interesting to me!
As for TC - I don't think it deserves (yet) a sub-forum of it's own: most of the time TC is limited to mentioning what the Dead Sea Scrolls or Septuagint says that is different to the traditional Masoretic Hebrew. Full on in-depth discussions of the TC of the Hebrew Bible don't usually appear, and I don't think would.