Summer is here again

It's hard to believe that I have now been living in Israel for a year now. Officially I flew to Israel on June 13th last year. In some ways the time feels like it has flown by and in other ways it feels like I haven't been here very long at all. So much has happened in this last year. I feel like I have learned a lot. Living in Israel has changed me somewhat, I feel like I've grown as a person more living here than in the States. Living in another culture has its own unique challenges.

Spring semester exams finished up last week on Thursday. Akkadian, the exam I was dreading the most was naturally the last one I had to take. It had to be the last one so I could worry about it. The picture to the left comes from my study sessions of Akkadian. After studying the various signs for hours I started playing around with them. The signs in the picture are from Lady Gaga's song Bad Romance there is no ro sound in Akkadian so I had to substitute ru. But other than that is the line from the song ra ra ah ah ah ro ma ro ma ma ga ga u la la! And then I realized that that line would insure that I never forgot those signs so I tried to come up with similar lines from songs to remember other signs. For the most part my strategy worked.
I still have one take home exam for the Assyrian sources class but I have until next week for that one. I'll probably work on that test this weekend.

The last several weeks there has been construction on the way up to campus. The city has been putting in bike paths all over Mount Scopus. From my observations the bike paths start and stop in very odd places. Entering and exiting the bike paths in some locations would be very dangerous to the biker and drivers. On the way to school the bike path construction caused them to tear up the sidewalks and eliminate a few parking spaces that were always full. Those who park their cars there now have to cross the bike path to put coins in the parking meter. Last week when I was walking to my Akkadian exam they were putting asphalt on the places where they broke up the sidewalk. Construction in Israel is mind boggling. They do not close the sidewalk you can walk by not even a foot from where a giant machine is picking up chunks of concrete. The construction workers do not wear hard hats but they do wear yellow vests. The supervisor will be the one sitting in the shade smoking a cigarette. They had put out the new asphalt with no signs indicating this. People were walking through the new asphalt and leaving shoe prints and none of the workers were bothered by this. I don't know how these people missed that the asphalt was still wet. It has a shiny quality to it, it smells awful and there is a guy in a steamroller driving towards you! I went around it which required walking out into the street and hoping a bus didn't hit me. Obviously I made it. Walking back the same way later I noticed they redid the asphalt because I can't find the shoe prints in it. They could have saved themselves some time by just putting up some signs.


The new students for the Summer checked in on Sunday and Monday this week. It was nice to already be in an apartment and not be dragging luggage everywhere. Every time one semester or session ends they try to kick me out of my dorm room even though I've paid for it. I tried to head it off buy going to the dorm office in person but it doesn't matter. My name is always on the list of people who need to move out. On the day they say I have to move out they sent by several maintenance men who tell me I have to be out of the apartment by a certain time. This requires multiple trips down to the office to get things sorted out. This time the lady in the office insisted I had to move because they had already scheduled my room for someone else for the Summer session. I had to throw a fit and it worked because I got to stay in the same apartment.


Monday evening I attended the mandatory orientation. It was exactly the same as last year but they assured me I had to attend because they had changed their policies. It was interesting hearing the same information but from the perspective of someone who has been here for a year. I would have been at the school anyway for the shopping trip to the mall. The Burger King is no longer in the mall but there is now a McDonald's! So I got my hamburger and french fries fix. I also went to the bookstore down on the first floor. They only have a small section with English books but I spent quite a bit of time looking them over. They were having a book sale so I ended up getting three young adult books...in Hebrew. These books are above my reading comprehension level in Hebrew. I thought it would be fun to try and read these with the help of a dictionary maybe one chapter a night depending on how long it takes me to read. I had the sales clerk help me pick out three that were in easier Hebrew. I'm looking forward to reading these.


Yesterday was a emergency preparedness day. I don't actually know what they called it. Yesterday at 11am all of the emergency sirens sounded throughout the country for two minutes. During this time everyone is supposed to go to the bomb shelter in the building. Rothberg International School had special permission not to disrupt the summer classes so we didn't have to go in the basement. The professor told us that the police,fire department and other safety related departments would be running drills throughout the day. The sirens also went off a 7pm last night for two minutes. This was to make sure you are prepared at home and know where the nearest shelter is located. My room is the bomb shelter in our apartment so I didn't have to go anywhere.

For the first Summer session I'm taking Intermediate Biblical Hebrew. There are 10 people in the class. I have the class five days a week. On Sunday we meet from 10am-3:30pm. Monday-Thursday 8:30-2pm. It's very intensive but I'll be able to get Intermediate Biblical Hebrew completed. So far the class has been very interesting. Today we worked on translating Psalm 23 which is one of my favorites.

From the last post:
Uncle Joe- Yes Hebrew is one of those languages where you have to conjugate the verbs differently depending on the person's gender that you are talking to.

Hammurabi's Code

Since there seems to be some interest in Akkadian I decided I would give you more of a taste of the language. I think the most famous work written in Akkadian is Hammurabi's Code. I remember studying this in World History in high school. Hammurabi's Code was one of the earliest law codes ever written down. I remember my teacher telling me that the laws were written on a stele in the center of each town so that anyone could come by and read the law. This way everyone would know what the punishment for each crime was there was no arbitrary decision on the part of the judge. What my high school teacher failed to tell us was that most people couldn't read anyway. In fact its very likely the king couldn't read either that is what scribes were for.

In my Akkadian class we've begun to translate parts of the law code and its very slow going. To the left we have the first step. This is Hammurabi's law code number 10 in cuneiform. It is probably best if you click to enlarge the picture so you can really see what the symbols look like. Each symbol can have several different values. For example one sign can mean dam or tam. But there is extra added fun, the Akkadian language was written with Sumerian characters. This would be like me trying to write English with Chinese characters. So sometimes the sign stands for a Sumerian word. Continuing the above example that same sign could also stand for the Sumerian word DAM.GAR which stands for the Akkadian word tamkārum which means merchant. So you look at each individual sign and you have to decide which meaning the each sign has in this sentence. The reason each sign can have different meanings is because Akkadian didn't have an alphabet.


Now that you have decided which meaning each sign has in this sentence you have something that looks like the picture to the right. In between each dash is the meaning of one sign. It can take several hours to arrive at this step. But wait your not done yet the fun continues!










The next step is called normalization. In this step you take the above and put the words together. Here you have to decide if one letter is double or not, sometimes the doubled letter is an indicator of a certain tense. This step also requires you to mark the long vowels which are sometimes the only indication that a word is plural. Since this was my homework assignment I had to type this part up so here is the result of Step 3:

Šumma šayīmānum nādin iddinušum u šībī ša ina maḫrišunu išamu lā itbalam bēl ḫulqima šībī mūde ḫulqišu itbalam šayīmānum šarrāq iddâk bēl ḫulqim ḫuluqšu ileqqe

Now for step 4 translation. The translation of law code number 10 is as follows:"If the purchaser does not produce the seller who sold it to him, and the witnesses in whose presence he purchased it (and) if the owner of the lost property produces witnesses to identify his lost property, the purchaser shall be put to death as a thief, the owner of the lost property shall recover his loss."

Explanation: Law code 10 is a continuation of law 9. Law 9 talks about a man who has lost something and then sees his object in the possession of another man. The second man says that he bought the object and says he can produce witnesses. The matter is brought before a judge so the original owner brings witnesses saying the object is his and the second man brings witnesses saying they saw him buy the object. In this case it is the seller who was the thief and he is put to death. So law 10 is another circumstance of the same crime.


I think that gives you a basic idea of what it's like to study Akkadian. Hope you enjoyed it.