E-Mail Response (received Tuesday, May 03, 2005 1:39 PM)

Dear Professor McDaniel,

I am very sorry to hear that you are disappointed in our editing of your lessons on "The Ten Commandments" for the Pastor's Bible Study, Volume 2. Contributors should be able to trust us to present their work accurately. We apologize that we have failed to do so and for causing you embarrassment among your colleagues.

 I have gone over the proofreading process of this volume very carefully to see what happened. Mistakes in the text apparently slipped in during copy processing (that point when the text is set into page proofs), because the program used for making proofs did not read the fonts correctly. As you say in your letter, you sent a PDF file of correct transliterations to Charles Puskas. Unfortunately, Chuck left Abingdon Press very shortly after he received the PDF. I replaced Chuck, but I did not did not know that the PDF existed. We did have a Hebrew expert proofreading the pages, but in some places, the copy-processing program reintroduced mistakes that had been corrected, and in some instances, corrections should have been made from the PDF. I accept responsibility for the mistakes in transliterations.

 The letters "a.t." that were included in your lessons stand for "author's translation." I approved this notation because the Pastor's Bible Study series is linked to our New Interpreter's Study Bible, an NRSV translation, and we wanted to alert readers to those instances when you were offering a different reading from the NRSV. We expect that by indicating these instances, we would afford opportunities for discussion. However, I should have indicated what “a.t.” meant at the beginning of the studies.

 Other editorial changes were made at the discretion of our editing process. One change in particular referred to Hebrew hawks. While we know that you meant no insult, and aimed at a clever alliteration, we discussed the phrase among the editors here and changed it to avoid any anachronistic implication of anti-Semitism in the interpretation. These are difficult times in the Middle East, which perhaps makes us cautious to a fault with the adjectives.

We are keeping a copy of the mistakes you have noted on file, so that in the event that this volume is reprinted, we can make the changes.

Thank you for your contribution to this series. Despite the transliteration errors, we are confident that your study will be a very useful tool for many pastors and lay people for years to come.

Best wishes,

Marianne Blickenstaff

Marianne Blickenstaff, Ph.D.

Editor Bibles, e-Publishing & Reference

Abingdon Press

201 Eighth Ave. South

Nashville, TN 37202

mblickenstaff@umpublishing.org

phone: (615) 749-6116