Utterly Rejected: Theology in Crisis in the Book of Lamentations

( Today is Tisha Be-Av, the ninth of Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar: the anniversary of the destruction of both the First Temple by the Babylonians, and the Second by the Romans, and the Expulsion from Spain; and I have held back posting these notes for now. On a lighter note, I was amused, when I came to this session at Limmud, to see the presenter standing at the door saying to passers-by 'Come in, come in!' whilst behind her the projector showed a slide with the talk title 'Utterly Rejected'. )

What I did this afternoon.

[michael@epicyclic ~]$ hebrew_grep שלום hebrew
./hebrew/iso8859-8: שלום-שלום
./hebrew/utf-8: שָׁלוֹם־שָׁלוֹם
./hebrew/windows-1255: שָׁלוֹם־שָׁלוֹם
./hebrew/utf-8.sans-nikkud: שלום
[michael@epicyclic ~]$ 

(Except that it actually reverses the output so it looks correct on gnome-terminal, which does not handle bidirectional text.)

Now I finally have a grep utility that can search for Hebrew text regardless of whether the files it's searching are encoded in UTF-8, Windows-1255 or ISO-8859-8; whether the text is logically ordered (UTF-8 Windows-1255) or visually (ISO-8859-8); whether nikkud (vowel points) are included or not; and whether ׳ ,״ and ־ are correctly encoded, or approximated by ASCII ", ' and -.

(And all that on a (still) empty stomach.)

Why didn't I do this years ago?