HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO PALEOJUDAICA! My first blog post, one year ago today, was a welcome message, a later version of which is now the About PaleoJudaica.com file in the links to the right. The second was on Saddam and Nebuchadnezzar. As far as I can tell, the subject I've blogged on most frequently is Aramaic (49 posts). (I've mentioned Hebrew more often [52 posts], but many of these were focusing on other things.) Both Aramaic and Hebrew have been addressed from many different angles. The next most frequently discussed topic has been Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (34 posts), although I've dealt with it less since Mark Goodacre started intensive coverage of it in his New Testament Gateway blog. The next is Iraq (30 posts), especially the looting of the Baghdad Museum and the country's archaeological sites. I covered that area a lot initially but nowadays only note things that especially catch my eye and leave the rest to the IraqCrisis list and Francis Deblauwe.

The post that drew the most hits in the last year was the August 5th entry "More on Mel and The Passion," which reported Frank Rich's Dowdification of Gibson (still uncorrected, at least by the Times) and which received about 7000 hits over twenty-four hours thanks mainly to a link from Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit. There's a recent important update on the story here. The second biggest hit grabber was my fisking of David Klinghoffer in "Leviticus and the Gay Marriage Debate," with about 1700 hits in a day or so, thanks mainly to a link from Andrew Sullivan.

My personal favorite post of the last year is "When Scholars Cry Wolf," which dealt with the overreaction of academics to the hysterical initial press reports about the looting of the National Museum of Iraq. This didn't get as many hits as some others, but I put more time and effort into it than into any other post and I still stand by it. The companion piece to this post, "About that Hague Convention", is a close second. Another important story has been the ongoing denial in the Arab world (and sometimes pandered to in the Western media) of the existence of Jewish temples on the Temple Mount in antiquity. Follow the links in these posts and see also entries on "Jewish temple deniers" and the Zayed Centre.

Some other interesting stories include the "James Ossuary", the "Jehoash Inscription", the Absalom's Tomb inscription, and the first-century burial shroud from Jerusalem.

I've learned a great many things from blogging. I'll just mention a few of them that stick in my mind. First, I've made a rule for myself that when I disagree with someone, I always try to imagine that I'm in the same room with the person, speaking to them face to face, when I compose the entry. That helps me keep to the point, stick to the facts, and avoid personal attacks. Second, I've learned that even that first rule doesn't necessarily work when it comes to sarcasm. Talking to someone in real life is different from making a blog entry. One can (and I'm afraid I do) make sarcastic comments that generally simply evaporate in normal conversation. They're accompanied by a context of expression, tone, day-to-day interaction, etc. that generally keep them in perspective. They don't evaporate in the Blogosphere, they get archived, and that context isn't there either. So sarcasm comes across much more harshly in blogging and I've had to learn to watch myself and ratchet it back.

The other main thing I've learned is that the mainstream media is generally pretty uninformed about our field and they tend to make a lot of errors. This is no doubt an occupational hazard of journalism: journalists have to cover a lot of things they don't know about and do it in a hurry. I would be more sympathetic about this if they would do two things. First, journalists and newspapers should make corrections when informed of errors and do it promptly at the bottom of the online version of the article in question. This used not to be possible and so corrections ended up in a small box on page 25 a week later, but technology has changed things and the mainstream media needs to catch up, at least to the standards of the Blogosphere. Happily, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of the New York Times has recently noted the problem too. (I'm talking here about substantive corrections; there's no need to flag spelling corrections, but they should be corrected!) Second, journalists should stop pushing their own political and other agendas outside the editorial pages and stop kidding themselves that we don't notice them doing it. The carelessness has been treated in any number of postings (see, for example, the Book of Revelations and the Magi and this and this and this). For examples of media bias (aside from the "Cry Wolf" and "More on Mel" posts noted above) see Time Magazine's pandering to the Jewish-temple deniers and follow the link in that post for an unattributed, historically inaccurate, and blatantly political insertion by the BBC into an article on Hezekiah's Tunnel.

Movies are, of course, often grossly irresponsibly inaccurate on historical matters. See my review of Stigmata and this posting on errors in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Novels frequently are as bad. See this posting on The Da Vinci Code. Despite all this, I rather enjoyed the film version of The Last Temptation of Christ.

All this is not to imply that I never make mistakes. No matter how careful I try to be, I still do sometimes. But every mistake I'm aware of has been corrected as soon as I found out about it.

At the moment PaleoJudaica has 67 incoming links from 57 other blogs. The counter stands at 42609 individual hits over the last year, during which time I have posted 332,691 words, apart from this posting. There have been more than 1100 individual hits and more than 2100 page views in the last week. That's close to a tenfold increase since the first month or so of PaleoJudaica. Will we see another tenfold increase in the next year? Well, no, I don't suppose so. But I hope you will keep on telling friends about the site. I'm still enjoying blogging and I'll keep doing it as long as it's fun.

That's enough introspection. Thanks for reading PaleoJudaica. Please keep coming back, keep sending me things, and keep telling me when you think I'm wrong. Onward!

UPDATE: Regarding newspaper corrections, reader David Mackinder points me to the Guardian's correction page and "homophone corner" at http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,3604,1176288,00.html. I say good for them, but they still should post individual corrections online at the bottom of the original piece in which the error occurred. As far as I know, no major newspaper does this, but it's standard in the Blogosphere.