Jewish Scripture Archives – J. David Stark

Daily Gleanings: Scriptures (12 November 2019)

Forthcoming from Westminster John Knox in fall 2020 is Ancient Jewish and Christian Scriptures, co-authored by John Collins, Craig Evans, and Lee Martin McDonald.

Apparently, as of this writing, this release date is too far out even for WJK to have the volume on their website (!).

According to WJK’s most recent print catalog, however:

Ancient Jewish and Christian Scriptures examines the writings included in and excluded from the Jewish and Christian canons of scripture and explores the social settings in which some of this literature was viewed as authoritative and some was viewed as either uninspired or heretical, and how those noncanonical writings demonstrate the historical, literary, and religious aspects of the culture that gave rise to the writings. John J. Collins, Craig A. Evans, and Lee Martin McDonald also show how literature excluded form the Jewish and Christian canons of scripture remains valuable today for understanding the questions and conflicts that early Jewish and Christian faith communities faced. Through this discussion contemporary readers acquire a broader understanding of biblical scripture and of Jewish and Christian faith inspired by scripture. (p. 14)

Daily Gleanings: Old Testament (8 November 2019)

Old Testament Essays openly releases three issues annually. According to the journal’s statement of purpose and scope,

Since its inception Old Testament Essays functions as a vehicle which publishes Old Testament research from various points of view. Its readers are members of the Old Testament Society of South Africa and its primary aim is to regulate and propagate the study of the Old Testament in Africa. Various fields related to the study of the Old Testament are covered: philological / linguistic studies, historical critical studies, archaeological studies, socio-historical studies, literary studies, rhetorical studies, et cetera.

HT: AWOL

Daily Gleanings (12 July 2019)

In the Review of Biblical Literature, Jeanette Mathews discusses Heath Thomas’s Habakkuk commentary in the Two Horizons series (Eerdmans, 2018). Mathews comments,

While the volume does offer an excellent commentary on the book of Habakkuk, it offers quite a bit more, resulting in a reasonably large volume dedicated to one small (three-chapter) biblical book. (1)

…

This book has many strengths. It covers the material in a well-informed and scholarly manner, drawing on major works on the book of Habakkuk, the Minor Prophets, biblical theology, and lament literature. Topics are well explained, and the language is readily available for lay readers. (2)

Mathews notes also “two points of concern” (3). The first has to do with a lack of transparency she perceives in the headings adopted in the text and reflected in the table of contents (3). The second “probably says more about sensitivity resulting from my own area of scholarship, biblical performance criticism” (3) and especially takes issue with Thomas’s description that Habbakuk “cannot act. He cannot move. He can only cry out to God” (188, qtd. on 3).

Even with these concerns, Mathews concludes enthusiastically,

I hope it will be evident from this review that I found Thomas’s book on Habakkuk insightful and thought-provoking, and I found myself in lively engagement with it. I would recommend it to others! (4)

For additional discussion, see Mathews’s full review in RBL.

Rocketbook distills some important productivity advice into a helpful infographic:

Daily Gleanings: Finds from AWOL (11 July 2019)

Oğuz Soysal and Başak Yıldız Gülşen’s Unpublished Bo-Fragments in Transliteration II (Bo 6151–Bo 9535) is freely available via open access from the University of Chicago. The description comments in part,

The monograph offers a large number of unpublished text fragments in photo and transliteration and gives succinct philological notes to these fragments. The fragments are part of a large collection that had been found during the early Turkish-German campaigns at the Hittite capital Hattusa before the Second World War.

…

Oğuz Soysal, a Hittitologist, and Başak Yıldız Gülşen, a curator of the Ankara Museum, provide photographs and transliterations of each piece.… Photos offer the users of his book all the information needed on the sign forms of the fragments, and the transliterations show how the authors have interpreted those signs. Wherever necessary, the authors give philological notes to explain certain forms or to present relevant text variants. Each fragment, if possible, is accompanied by information on its assignment to a Hittite text or text genre, the date of the composition, the fragmentʼs measurements, and previous bibliography.

HT: AWOL

Per the Digital Classicist Wiki,

Scholarship in classics frequently involves dealing with unusual alphabets, scripts, and letterforms. The Unicode standard is designed to encode the characters of the world’s writing systems (living and ancient), but it does not attempt to encode glyphs, which have been ceded to fonts and type design.

The wiki provides a helpful list of “pages dealing with fonts and specialized typographic needs of classicists.”

For more about Unicode, see “Typing Biblical Languages in Unicode.”

HT: AWOL

Daily Gleanings: New Titles from SBL Press (9 July 2019)

New from SBL Press is Marvin Sweeney, ed., Theology of the Hebrew Bible, Volume 1: Methodological Studies. According to the publisher,

This volume presents a collection of studies on the methodology for conceiving the theological interpretation of the Hebrew Bible among Jews and Christians as well as the treatment of key issues, such as creation, the land of Israel, divine absence, and others.

Also new from SBL Press is Marianne Grohmann and Hyun Chul Paul Kim, eds., Second Wave Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible. According to the publisher, the

essays from a diverse group of scholars offer new approaches to biblical intertextuality that examine the relationship between the Hebrew Bible, art, literature, sociology, and postcolonialism. Eight essays in part 1 cover inner-biblical intertextuality, including studies of Genesis, Judges, and Qoheleth, among others. The eight postbiblical intertextuality essays in part 2 explore Bakhtinian and dialogical approaches, intertextuality in the Dead Sea Scrolls, canonical critisicm, reception history, and #BlackLivesMatter. These essays on various genres and portions of the Hebrew Bible showcase how, why, and what intertextuality has been and present possible potential directions for future research and application.

Daily Gleanings: New Releases (26 June 2019)

Newly available from SBL Press is Gideon R. Kotzé, Wolfgang Kraus, and Michaël N. van der Meer’s edited collection, XVI Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies: Stellenbosch, 2016. According to the Press,

This book includes papers given at the XVI Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS), held in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2016. Essays by scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America identify and discuss new topics and lines of inquiry and develop fresh insights and arguments in existing areas of research into the Septuagint and cognate literature. This is an important new resource for scholars and students who are interested in different methods of studying the literature included in the Septuagint corpora, the theology and reception of these texts, as well as the works of Josephus.

Matthew Crawford’s new book, The Eusebian Canon Tables: Ordering Textual Knowledge in Late Antiquity (OUP, 2019), has now released. It may, however, still be en route to some retailers (e.g., Amazon as of this writing). Per the publisher’s description,

One of the books most central to late-antique religious life was the four-gospel codex, containing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A common feature in such manuscripts was a marginal cross-referencing system known as the Canon Tables. This reading aid was invented in the early fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea and represented a milestone achievement both in the history of the book and in the scholarly study of the fourfold gospel. In this work, Matthew R. Crawford provides the first book-length treatment of the origins and use of the Canon Tables apparatus in any language.

HT: Larry Hurtado