Daily Gleanings: Old Testament (8 November 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

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: Ezekiel (16 October 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

According to Tommy Wasserman,

Another portion of the 2nd-3d-century Papyrus 967 (LXX, RA 967), discovered in 1931, that contains parts of Ezekiel, Esther and Daniel has now been digitized and is available on-line.

The newly digitized portion is of Ezekiel. For more information, including links to some of the images of 967, see Wasserman’s original post.

Daily Gleanings: Assyrian (3 October 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutesThe University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute has made their 21-volume Assyrian Dictionary openly available online. Per the Institute,

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was conceived to provide more than lexical information alone, more than a one-to-one equivalent between Akkadian and English words. By presenting each word in a meaningful context, usually with a full and idiomatic translation, it recreates the cultural milieu and thus in many ways assumes the function of an encyclopedia. Its source material ranges in time from the third millennium B.C. to the first century A.D., and in geographic area from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Zagros Mountains in the east.

Completed in 2010, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has become an invaluable source for the study of the civilizations of the ancient Near East, their political and cultural history, their achievements in the sciences of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, linguistics, and the timeless beauty of their poetry.

HT: Randall Bailey

Free Access to the International Critical Commentary

Reading time: 2 minutes

The International Critical Commentary has more than 100 years under its belt. Many of the original volumes are openly available online.1

The International Critical Commentary continues to be kept alive with the publication of new editions to take account of more recent scholarship.2

Of course, these more recent volumes are now the touchstones for the series. But the original volumes remain a treasure trove of critical exegetical insight from previous generations that shouldn’t be ignored.

Background

In its first iteration, the International Critical Commentary took its point of departure from several excellent German commentaries of the period—by figures like De Wette, Meyer, Keil, and Delitzsch.3

The International Critical Commentary wanted to do for English-speaking audiences what these prior series had done for German-speaking ones. In particular, the commentary’s goal was to “be abreast of modern biblical scholarship, and in a measure lead its van” (i.e., vanguard).

Structure and Scope

The commentary’s of each biblical book begins with an introduction that discusses the state of scholarship on that book. When helpful, this discussion includes treatment of the book’s history of interpretation.

The commentary aimed to serve “students and clergyman” of varying levels of expertise. So it routinely includes technical details but separates them from more general material. But instead of practical or homiletical notes, the series’s volumes chiefly focus on matters of history, archaeology, and biblical theology.

Open Access

Most or all of the original International Critical Commentary volumes are now in the public domain, scanned, and openly available online.

If you’d like to start accessing the scholarship they contain, just enter your name and email below. I’ll then email you a one-page summary with the exact links to where you can get each volume I’ve come across so you don’t have to spend time hunting for them.

Happy reading and researching!


  1. For bringing to my attention the availability of several volumes from this series, I’m grateful to Randall Bailey. 

  2. Featured image provided by Internet Archive

  3. For the background material on the International Critical Commentary, I am drawing particularly on the Editors’ Preface that appeared during the series’ supervision by C. A. Briggs, S. R. Driver, and Alfred Plummer.