Excellent research day

For those who don't know, I first applied to the HUC graduate program before the admissions officer suggested I take a look at the rabbinic program. Obviously I chose the rabbinical path... but yesterday I got back to my roots.

On Friday, I found this great Hebrew resource book listing all rabbinic material based off of Biblical verses. I.e. I looked up "Exodus 22:17" and there were two huge paragraphs full of abbreviations. I knew the Talmudic abbreviations, but that only got me past the first two lines. So Sunday night, I emailed the fabulous rare book librarian, asking to make an appointment for help the next morning. I thought it would take him ten minutes to decipher, but instead, we pored over that book for over an hour. In the end, we had to find another little-used book that detailed all abbreviations. Who knew, for example, that the letters "mem-tav pay-gimel" stood for Megillat Taanit, part 3? I'd never even heard of Megillat Taanit before, no wonder I didn't recognize the reference! By the time we were done, I had over 17 new sources to go through, most of them only in Hebrew and completely unfamiliar to me before we started.

Second, and even more exciting for me, my thesis advisor had given me a book recommendation that was supposedly an index to Biblical verse references in Philo. I say "supposedly," because it was hard to even find the book at first, since I hadn't realized it in French. Once I finally tracked it down in the stacks, I couldn't read it. Loathe to ask for more help, I skimmed the series and found an actual list of verses (still in French) in the very back "additif" section. I managed to find the verse I was looking for, but then still couldn't figure out the abbreviation next to it, "D SPEC." Thankfully, this time Google could help. I plugged in "Philo de Spec" (which I figured was a good start) and lo and behold, Philo wrote something called De Specialibus Legibus, known in English as The Special Laws. The Jewish Encyclopedia told me that The Special Laws were the last part of a book entitled, On the Law, and what do you know, On the Law was listed in the library catalog! It took me twenty-five minutes to go from the French book to the actual English Philo text, but I have to say, I was very proud of myself when I finally found it. :)

I came home and explained all this to Jonathan, who glazed over a little and shook his head like "thank god it's you not me." I returned the favor later that night though, when I did the same exact same thing: he was explaining to me in detail the steps he was taking in order to fix the problem he was having with building a RAID on his server. I guess we're all geeks in our different ways!