Daily Gleanings: Updates (6 January 2020)

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Thanks so much to all of you who took the time to complete my 2019 reader survey.

Your feedback is immensely valuable. I’ll definitely be revisiting it as I continue planning content for 2020.

Daily Gleanings

For the moment, I especially wanted to update you on the Daily Gleanings series.

Several of you both in the survey and outside it mentioned the value you’ve been getting from this series. I’m very grateful you’ve found it so helpful, and I appreciate your encouragement about it.

I’ve been finding the content in that series very helpful myself too. So I do want to continue covering this content, but I am going to experiment some more with its format this month (and perhaps beyond).

Upcoming Experiments

You’ll still get the larger blog article first thing every Monday. But in this experiment, I won’t publish the additional five posts each week that have been specifically titled “Daily Gleanings.”

Instead, I’ll try treating the content this series has covered in other ways.

For instance, some of the content in the Daily Gleanings series, I’d like to treat more fully and helpfully. So this will get “promoted” into larger article-type posts.

Other Daily Gleanings-type content will likely be more helpful if its organized more closely than a series of short blog posts will allow.

For example, rather than separate posts on related open access resources spread out over a number of weeks, I might batch those related resources and comments on them together in a downloadable PDF.

Conclusion

I’m grateful that the content in the Daily Gleanings series has been so helpful. It’s been very useful to me too both in the writing of it and in having this content available for later.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with new ways of formatting this content. And of course, I welcome your comments and input as this experiment develops.

Besides in other posts or downloadable PDFs, what other formats might you find helpful for receiving Daily Gleanings-type content in the future?

Daily Gleanings: Theology (3 January 2020)

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Now available from Crossway is Gavin Ordlund’s Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals.

According to the publisher, the volume addresses a “‘me and my Bible’ approach to theology”:

This book aims to set forth a vision for how engaging historical theology can enrich and strengthen the church today—and highlight how it can be done without abandoning a Protestant identity. By addressing two key doctrines—the doctrines of God and the atonement—and drawing from neglected theologians—Boethius, Gregory the Great, and John of Damascus—this book charts a course for evangelicals eager to draw from the past to meet the challenges of the present.

Daily Gleanings: Textual Criticism (2 January 2020)

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Now available from Brill is Donald Parry’s treatment of the Dead Sea Isaiah scrolls and their variants.

According to the publisher,

Donald W. Parry systematically presents, on a verse-by-verse basis, the variants of the Hebrew witnesses of Isaiah (the Masoretic Text and the twenty-one Isaiah Dead Sea Scrolls) and briefly discusses why each variant exists…. Variant characterizations include four categories: (a) accidental errors, e.g., dittography, haplography, metathesis, graphic similarity; (b) intentional changes by scribes and copyists; (c) synonymous readings; (d) scribes’ stylistic approaches and conventions.

HT: Jim Davila

Daily Gleanings: Community Rule (31 December 2019)

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Now available from SBL Press is Sarianna Metso’s critical edition of the Community Rule.

According to the Press,

The Community Rule serves to illuminate the religious beliefs and practices as well as the organizational rules of the group behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, there is no single, unified text of the Community Rule; rather, multiple manuscripts of the Community Rule show considerable variation and highlight the work of ancient Jewish scribes and their intentional literary development of the text. In this volume, Sarianna Metso brings together the surviving evidence in a new edition that presents a critically established Hebrew text with an introduction and an English translation.

The edition addresses all surviving witnesses for the Rule and includes a critical apparatus.

Daily Gleanings: DRH (30 December 2019)

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The Database of Religious History (DRH) “is a massive, standardized, searchable encyclopedia of the current best scholarly opinion on historical religious traditions and the historical record more generally.”

Much of the challenge the DRH tries to address is the volume of scholarly literature being produced on religious history and the difficulty of keeping current with it all.