Learning the basics of Biblical Hebrew from a book

“Our knowledge of Biblical Hebrew is directly dependent upon Jewish oral tradition and thus on the state of that tradition during and following the various dispersions of the Jews from Palestine. This dependence arises from the peculiarly deficient orthography in which the biblical text was written: it is essentially vowelless, or at most, vocalically ambiguous (see below, §8). The actual pronunciation of the language was handed down orally … The written consonantal text itself achieved a final authoritative form around the end of the first century A. D.”

– The introduction to Thomas O. Lambdin’s “Introduction to Biblical Hebrew” (1971), pages xiii-xiv

For nearly three years, I have read Thomas O. Lambdin’s “Introduction to Biblical Hebrew” – some 284 pages of it. Specifically, I read it from 14 August 2022 through 25 July 2025, at which time I completely finished it – excepting the appendices, index, and the entirety of the glossaries (although I read many parts of these glossaries). I did this completely from a book, and never had the benefit of a classroom, a professor, or a native speaker – or even a recording of one, for that matter! I’ve never heard so much as one hour of audio of the language, even from non-native speakers, and this made it somewhat daunting at times. It may have increased the difficulty level in at least some ways, and I don’t recommend it to others unless other options are not available (as they were not for me).

Why I believe that critical race theory is unscientific

Scientific theories must be testable. But if both results are believed to “prove” one right …

Suppose I told you that something really crazy happened last night. Specifically, at midnight last night, everything in the universe “shrank to one-half its original dimensions.” If you were to get a yardstick, you’d see that the size of certain nearby objects has changed in the manner claimed. If so, then that would prove me right. But, if the yardstick appeared to show that the size was the same as before, then it’s because the yardstick also “shrank” as well. Thus, my hypothesis has still not been disproved – in fact, it gets “proved” either way! If you test something scientifically, then this has to be “valid” science, after all. To get a “valid” scientific hypothesis, all you have to do is to test that hypothesis, right? I mean, that’s “all” that’s required for something to be scientific.

… then it’s still not science, because there has to be some possible result that could prove it wrong

The problem with this argument is that testability alone is not sufficient. The hypothesis also has to be falsifiable. That is, you have to be able to conceive of a scenario where your hypothesis could be proven false – that is, where it could be “falsified.” If you believe that either of two opposite results would “prove” your own point of view, then you’re still not doing science. Your hypothesis may still be testable, but the test is unscientific, because its advocates cannot conceive of a result that disproves the hypothesis by their own standards. If you’re trying to determine which of two movies is “inherently better,” this kind of thing doesn’t have to be scientific. Subjective claims like this are allowed to be unscientific – not to be confused with being anti-scientific, which means something else. The problems come when theories that are not scientific are claiming to be such, like the earlier claim about the universe shrinking. This is a different kind of claim from one movie being “inherently better” than the other. The shrinking-universe hypothesis claims to be objective, and thus crosses the line into the territory of pseudoscience. The shrinking-universe hypothesis is much more deserving of censure than those theories that never claimed to be “scientific” in the first place. When you claim to be “scientific,” you need to be able to back up this claim.

The “French Revolutionary Wars”: A great European cataclysm

“Do you hear in the fields

The howling of those fearsome soldiers?

They are coming into your midst

To slit the throats of your sons and consorts.

To arms, citizens!

Form up your battalions!

Let’s march, let’s march!

May impure blood soak our fields’ furrows!”

– English translation of “La Marseillaise” (1792), originally written in French during the French Revolution – now used as the national anthem of France

The French Revolution sucked much of Europe into a decade of bitter warfare

In 1789, a French mob stormed the Bastille on the 14th of July. This is the most famous date of the French Revolution, with its anniversary today celebrated in France as “Bastille Day.” This is actually the national holiday of France today, much as “Independence Day” is the national holiday of the United States. But there’s more to the story than this domestic revolution, although that is a critically important part of it. The French Revolution also sucked much of Europe into a decade of bitter warfare. The later years of the French Revolution were thus set against the backdrop of warfare. That is, there was an overlap between the later “French Revolution” and the early “French Revolutionary Wars.” This post will cover the often-forgotten conflicts that were associated with the French Revolution. I have saved my coverage of the Napoleonic Wars for another post, even though these two topics are intimately connected. Thus, I will instead be focusing here on the “French Revolutionary Wars,” which lasted for ten years in all. In so many ways, they were a great European cataclysm.

Storming of the Bastille, 1789

Gerald Ford: Owing his presidency to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

“In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take the office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress.”

– Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution (ratified 1967), Sections 1 and 2

In 1974, Richard Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office. He said that “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.” (Source: Speech given in the Oval Office, 8 August 1974) This means that Gerald Ford is the only person to become president following a resignation. He was also the first (and, so, far, the only) person to become president, via any portion of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. In his case, it was two portions. And, as often noted, he was also the first (and, so far, the only) person who was never elected as either president or vice president, but who still became president anyway. He served out the remainder of Richard Nixon’s last term, and succeeded in getting his party’s nomination in 1976. But he was still defeated that year, and was never elected to a presidential term of his own.

Gerald Ford

In defense of the American Founding Fathers

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

– The United States Declaration of Independence (July 4th, 1776)

In recent decades, our Founding Fathers have been the target of some bitter revisionist attacks. For example, many cannot forgive them for being slaveholders. Many cannot forgive them for infringing on Native American lands, or their “failure” to give women the right to vote – as though that would have been possible in the eighteenth century (which it clearly wasn’t). Racism, sexism, and any number of other modern charges are leveled at the Founding Fathers. In short, the Founding Fathers are judged by various modern standards – which is always a mistake. Things that today are an accomplished fact were, in their own time, completely unattainable. The pace of progress is usually slow, and some problems can only be fixed after several generations have passed. Thus, in the larger perspective of history, the progress in the Founding Fathers’ time was actually astonishingly fast, and more than anyone in that time would have dreamt possible. It is true that our Founding Fathers had some very real flaws, but the revisionist arguments about them seem to have even greater flaws. Few of those who make these arguments have ever studied the Founding Fathers’ actual ideas in any sort of depth. Thus, an examination of the Founding Fathers’ ideas would seem appropriate here, to show that their ideas have actually aged remarkably well. Their ideas can withstand the most vigorous scrutiny, and remain quite relevant … all these years later.

George Mason, one of our lesser-known Founding Fathers

In defense of the United States of America

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”

– Abraham Lincoln, in his “Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield” (27 January 1838)

In 1776, the United States rightly declares that “all men are created equal”

On a warm summer day in 1776, the Continental Congress declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Source: Declaration of Independence, 1776) It has often been noted that the man who wrote these words was a Virginia slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson. Clearly, the promise of equality had not yet been realized when he wrote these words, even in his own household. There was much to do in the coming decades to give these words a fuller meaning. But people have rightly looked to these words as a “promised beginning.” We made a promise that, one day, all men (and also women) in this country would see legal recognition of their equality. Some interpret this to mean that all of us must have equal wealth, or equal income, or equal status of some other kind. If so, then the promised equality could never be realized, because there will always be people who succeed, and there will always be others who desperately struggle to make ends meet. No utopian scheme ever proposed for ending poverty has ever yet been brought to pass, despite fervent efforts to implement such schemes. Whether or not these schemes bring any actual progress … may be a better topic for another post. But the Founding Fathers did create a “land of the free, [and] home of the brave.” They created a land of opportunity, where one could rise through industry and honest toil. And they created equality of opportunity, arguably the kind of equality that was meant to be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence”

Forgotten battlegrounds of World War One: The Balkans and Eastern Europe

A war that killed at least 15 million people began with two quick gunshots in the Balkans. The fighting of World War One began in the Balkans, and eventually saw some of its greatest bloodshed in this same region. Popular historians often talk about the assassination at Sarajevo, because it sucked in many of the other nations of the world – including, eventually, the United States. But subsequent events in the Balkans tend to be unknown among the general public, even lesser-known than the complex origins of the war that one can find there. Thus, this may be a good time to examine the events of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and how they engulfed much of the rest of the world when those two fateful gunshots were fired there.

Sarajevo citizens reading a poster with the proclamation of the Austrian annexation in 1908