@Davïd @Susan Humm... Why does A Little Hebrew transliterates יְהוָ֔ה as Adonai?

transliterate.com: יְהוָ֔ה → yhwh

opensiddur.org/tools/transliterate: יְהוָ֔ה → ʾăd̲ōnāy

paulvargas.org/transliterate: יְהוָ֔ה → yhwh

@JackDouglas One thing that would make my usage much more meaningful is a way to tag hosts as full time servers or not. The "no data" messages via Pushover are quite useful...for machines that are supposed to be on 24/7. It's not meaningful for office-hours servers and the noise of notifications coming over about these systems drowns out the ones that could be really useful.

@PaulVargas Because Jews observe a prohibition on the pronunciation or representation of the divine name. See the Encyclopedia Judaica article on "God, names of"; use CTRL-F to look for "prohibition" and you will see the explanation. @Susan

@Davïd Ah! I see. I never imagined that this prohibition also extended to these tools. Thanks! :-)

@PaulVargas For more of interest, see (if you can) this article: Berel Dov Lerner, "Please Consider Not Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain", Expository Times vol. 121 no. 7 (April 2010), pp. 339-341.

@PaulVargas I'm interested to see that, too. A clever bit of programming also!

+ (then must get to work!) an interesting blog series by Claude Mariottini.

@Davïd Nope.

@Davïd Yup.

@Davïd It is not complicated. Should be the first replacement.

@Davïd Although....according to that article, ʾAdonai, is also forbidden in secular writings (because they may be discarded). And if a transliteration of Torah is instead considered sacred (where that’s allowed), then YHW/VH (Paul’s consonant-only version) may as well be OK, since it’s written all over the MT. Of course, English doesn’t make it so easy to include weird(/qere) vowels to make the point (didn’t intend that pun, but I like it).

Anybody know if there’s a way, on Biblegateway, to tell it my preferred bible versions so that I don’t have to go through that whole dropdown every time I want to change it around? I only want ESV, SBL, WLC in there, plus the button to click to “show in all English translations.” But each time I want to go back and forth between English and original language texts, I have to scroll by 5 versions of RVR (@PaulVargas :-P) et al.

(@PaulVargas what’s the second “R” anyway? “RVR” has a different meaning for me.)

And, the unpointed tetragram at Google translate gives.... Jehovah. Interesting. I'd have expected either Ha-Shem or Adonai or LORD, or maybe... just like we (well, some of us) say it, at the risk of offending someone. Jehovah seems like an odd decision. (@PaulVargas)

@Susan Google Translate's mappings are subject to social engineering—an area that Jehovah's Witnesses know a thing or two about.

@Caleb Funny, I was going to comment that one way of not taking sides is to choose something that nobody thinks is right, but then I thought of JWs. I guess it’s not totally unreasonable.

@Susan Did you mean e.g. RVR1960 = Reina-Valera, Revisión 1960?

@PaulVargas ah, Revisión. Yes.

@Susan If I understand correctly, in the browser, add the passage that you want to search after the equals sign: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=ESV;WLC;SBLGNT&search=

e.g. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=ESV;WLC;SBLGNT&search=Gen 1:1 or https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=ESV;WLC;SBLGNT&search=John 1:1

I hope it helps. :-)

@PaulVargas Sure, I suppose manipulating the URL itself would be the best solution. I was imagining a way to make the settings such that the point and click options were more felicitous. But this works. Thanks.

@Susan I have confirmed your sympathy for the ESV. ;-)

@PaulVargas I’m not stuck on it, but it tends to be my default, yes.

Hi everyone! Some of you don't know me. It's been a while since I've posted on BHSE. Almost 2 years now! And when I picked up posting once again last week it was not with the intention to stay.

Gone Quite (A.K.A Monica) approached me about her concerns with the site and I have to say that I agree with her.

I know you all work really hard and this is not to disparage your efforts here. But I think there's something fundamentally flawed with BHSE.

Gone Quite is disappointed and troubled by the fact that the site has become too narrow in its doctrine. While I agree with much of the conservative Christianity on display here, I'm troubled by something similar.

It seems to me that too many people are not judging answers by the quality and depth of research but by the doctrine and beliefs that they appear to support or negate.

I'm sorry. I have to leave for work. I will continue this later.

@MatthewMiller We all agree there is a huge cognitive dissonance going on here. Most of us even agree it's a flaw of some kind. What nobody seems to agree on is any course of action that's better than the one we've got. Even what is symptomatic of the issue is not agreed on (as you'll see in a second). We do pretty generally agree that certain "fixes" would make things worse. If you have a better solution to offer, please by all means make your way to meta and explain what that might be.

@MatthewMiller Gone Quiet is troubled by the mere existence of Christian doctrine and the fact that we haven't ruled out the expression of it on this site. I'm not saying she's a bad person for that—she has strongly held beliefs of her own and I respect her for that even if we disagree on our beliefs. But in her book it's not acceptable to have, much less participate in, a site where Christians are free to express what they believe a text should be interpreted mix and matched with other beliefs.

The issue for GQ is not BH being too narrow but being too broad. She (and a few others) ardently hoped to limit all answers to "academic" bracketed expressions and a subset of hermeneutical approaches. The general outcome of the ensuing debate was that we want a broader spectrum of input to be possible: including BOTH academic types with hedged conclusions as well as people that include overt expressions of religious belief in their interpretations. That—not narrowness—is the core of GQ's issue.

GQ and a few others feel the very presence of that sort of content makes the environment unfriendly to their particular doctrinal beliefs. And they are right: in a sense it does. The trouble is we can't just exclude the things they want to exclude without actually narrowing the spectrum of allowed doctrinal viewpoints—which is just what we're trying to avoid.

@MatthewMiller Some amount of this is unavoidable. The voting system on all SE sites is anonymous and is a crowd sourced aggregate signal. How people vote is not something that can be legislated. That being said I'm pretty confident in saying that there are a lot of us out here voting based on research quality and usefulness more than on our personal beliefs.

@MatthewMiller And I believe the numbers evidence this. How else do you explain GQ's own posts being the top-voted posts on nearly every question she ever answered in the face of a voting user base that is heavily weighted towards a different doctrinal framework than she was usually representing?

At some point the choice comes down to choosing between ① coping with the existing perpetual cognitive dissonance and occasional odd vibes surrounding minority views (but them being technically welcome, and in practice to date the better researched and presented ones have been quite well received, GQ included) or ② in shutting the door on whole swaths of people interested in hermeneutics and making their expressions really and truly unwelcome.

We've gone so far as to severely limit the scope of questions to avoid directly asking about theology (this avoiding the almost inevitable nonsense that is prooftexing-pretending-to-be-hermeneutics) and all questions about actual topical issues have to be starting with the limited context of a specific verse (thus putting all potential answers and interpretation methods on a relatively level playing field).

We've also put limits on how blatant some religious expressions can be (mostly meaning they have to stick to describing their own beliefs about a text rather that belittling others). They also are REQUIRED to demonstrate the how of their interpretation, we've decided to outright eject pure doctrinal conclusions thrown out with no explanation of the hermeneutics that got them there.

Those are huge things and they help a lot. Again they don't solve everything and as I said above even with all these measures taken the level of dissonance still drives even the most devoted among us batty sometimes.

But all that to say I don't believe the issue you gave expression to (even if you were only a proxy) is really reflective of what's going on. But I'd welcome a better expression of the problem and/or a proposition if you think there is something going on that's not being discussed.

Thanks @Caleb! On my way to work, I decided to delete my comments. I know I don't have a handle on all the issues in play. I really only know the reasons why I am frustrated and they have little to do with the way that the editors of this site are handling the situation. I apologize. Thank you for your diligence and the many countless hours you spent making this sites exploration of God's word possible.

@MatthewMiller No worries. I actually do appreciate an attempt to express that something is bothering you. We can't fix what we don't know is broken. The monologue above is to try to eliminate some ground we've been over and suggest that if feedback is going to get is anywhere it would really need to bring something new to the table (even if that isn't a new issue or solution, just a different expression of one that cuts through the fog).

That being said I'm still curious if you want to elaborate on:

> I really only know the reasons why I am frustrated

@MatthewMiller I'm on my way to bed and likely won't pick this up until next week but just two things real quick off the top of my head.

① Moderators != Editors. The community as a whole has the same editorial rights as moderators. Just a terminology issue, but terminology matters, esp on this site.

② That whole question is a self-answer. Please whatever you do don't judge any site on the SE network by working on selfies. The format makes them extraordinarily hard to get right and even the most successful posters struggle with them on ALL sites on the network. BH is likely ever harder than many.

They aren't against the rules and there is nothing wrong with your posting them, but you have to leave everything to do with them out of your calculations about the site is doing as a whole. They will always be anomalies.

While I somewhat enjoy the give and take of the voting system, I do also find it frustrating when my answers are not voted up or voted down for reasons which seem beyond hermenutics. This is of course partly a personal problem. But after spending some time and effort writing an answer, I think we would all like to see out efforts rewarded.

WOW where did malignancies come from?! I promise that was auto-correct issues not a Freudian slip.

@Caleb not sure what you mean by selfies.

@MatthewMiller Where you as the author posit both the question and an answer.

@Caleb that is not true. I do not have time to digest and refute all you've written before Shabbat, but I never said that Christian doctrine shouldn't exist somewhere. Most obviously, I have no problem with Christianity.SE. Duh.

My problem is religious belief -- any, but Christianity has been the only consistent problem on this site -- being presented as truth, as a basis for answers, on a site that doesn't claim to be religious. Fix the content or the claim -- don't care which, but they need to match.

@Caleb fooey, one more thing now: did you mean to insult @MatthewMiller like that? "A proxy", as if he can't form and express his own opinions? He and I had a conversation. What he does beyond that is his doing. Much as you might like to believe otherwise, I am not some sort of nefarious puppet-master and I think you owe both of us an apology.