"You know that latkes and dreidels and presents are all good fun, / But if that's all you do, then your holiday's just begun." I think they plagiarized this from the intro to C-MY?.

@Shokhet Wow. Thanks very much for sharing your work here and in your class!

I'm actually tempted to edit this quotation into the question part of the Intro and make C-MY? bleeding edge, but eh.

@IsaacMoses My pleasure :)

( anything for more internet points :P )

@all I'm not quite sure what to make of this answer to a question of mine. I don't know what the "BHS" is, or if it's a source used by Jews.

I mean, the answer came from someone with >6K rep on BH.....

help

well, he also cites "the Samaritan Pentateuch" .......should someone make a mention of "Jewish sources for a Jewish site"? ....I think this is his first post

@MonicaCellio Can you help me with that? ....you have some experience with BH, no?

@Shokhet BHS is a scholarly source, not a religious one. So where Jewish tradition would say that if there's a difference between mesorah and an extant manuscript then mesorah wins, scholars will look at all the sources. As well they should. I haven't studied BHS or the Leningrad Codex on which it's based and can't speak to the details of differences there.

High rep on BH might or might not mean much. In this case, note that the user has over 200 answers and not a single one into double digits. He's persistent, prolific... and shares doctrine with the majority there, many of whom vote on doctrine rather than SE norms of answer quality. Joseph isn't bad -- BH has some real drivel-spewers, some with high rep, and he's not one of those -- but I do not consider him someone to look to there, either.

Most of the users there want to use the site to advance Christian ideas, and they've had official support in doing so. (Still have, but the newer mods do better there.) They now have a few people who are trying to be scholarly rather than evangelical, and who "get" what SE sites are supposed to be. They are in a minority. Answers from David, Frank Luke, or Dan (maj... whatever his name is now) are usually well-supported, sourced, and sound. They are the best of the site, answer-wise, IMO.

But, to come back to your original question, they are bringing scholarly sources, which may or may not be consistent with Jewish sources and tradition. As with anything else you see from strangers on the Internet, you should fact-check anything that really matters to you. There have been a few Jews on BH (most have left but Bruce still hangs out there) & some of the Christians cite Jewish sources, so you'll see mentions of Rashi & the Rambam & the talmud there too, alongside the rest.

As for the answer you received here, I'm having trouble following it. More specifically, I don't see how he (or the source he's citing, if it's their argument) get from what's on the page to that conclusion about the cities.

@MonicaCellio I didn't necessarily mean to equate "high rep on BH" with "bad" .... I just didn't understand the answer that well, to begin with.

@MonicaCellio I did see some WP links; I'll look those up.

@Shokhet I didn't think you were doing that. Rather, I thought you might be thinking that high rep there might mean particularly credible or reliable or something, and, well, there are issues on that site. Some of the high-rep users give good answers. I think this one is kind of in the middle; he's not one of the bad ones but he's not at the top either. IMO.

@MonicaCellio Oh. Got it.

@Shokhet probably a good idea. And sorry if I gave you more answer than you were looking for; I wasn't trying to overflow at you. :-)

@MonicaCellio That's all right; I'll usually rather too much information than too little :)

( which is a problem in preparing a speech for Friday night....and the time just got cut from 45-50 minutes to 35 :0)

@Shokhet yup. And I don't want to just give an opinion without leaving a trail; I tried to point out some specifics so you could look and evaluate on your own should you choose.

@Shokhet ouch.

@MonicaCellio Thank for that :)

I'm preparing a d'var torah for Saturday lunch, but it's much shorter. And the timing is flexible. And, I hope, the audience is sympathetic. :-)

@MonicaCellio I mentioned to Isaac before that I'll probably print out some of the Q/A sets I posted here for quick notes -- I might not get around to speaking out all of them, but I certainly hope to cover some of them.

This is the pikuach nefesh baShabbos one ;-)

@Shokhet excellent. And once you're done with the talk you won't need those printouts so you can give them away to people who might then come visit the site. :-)

@MonicaCellio :)

@Shokhet ah. I'll be interested in hearing how it goes (what you cover, etc).

@MonicaCellio @Shokhet and how many upvotes you get!

good luck!

@MonicaCellio I found out about this site when someone quoted research he did for his chabura on MY :-) .....what goes around, comes around, I suppose :)

@Shokhet oh, neat!

I found out about this site when Joel tweeted it.

@MonicaCellio So you're a real "early adopter," huh? :P

@Shokhet well, 2.0. I committed to the Area 51 proposal for the site here but somehow missed that it already existed as an SE 1.0 site that I could presumably have gone and joined. So I was here on the first day of beta, but not for the couple years before that.

@MonicaCellio Ah. I see.

I just got here, relatively speaking :)

@MonicaCellio I just finished reading Joseph's answer....I'll have to agree with Double AA:

.....I just learned from his answer that some scholars had the text with a ה, while people who kept the tradition ("Masoretes;" I suppose that would be us :P) have the text without the ה.....but I don't see how his conclusion follows.

@Shokhet yeah, that's what I was scratching my head about too.

I hope he responds to the comment by connecting the dots better in his answer.

The most common Latin phrase I'll use and be asked for explanation is "non-sequitor" ....I think I might hang on to this one as an example :P

:-)

.....anyway, I need to condense the other parts of my notes (non-MY parts) into something usable for a presentation, so TZT!

@MonicaCellio Thanks for the help with that parshanut answer :)

@Shokhet TZT and and early shabbat shalom!

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Does this mean I can duchen now?