New TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism

Volume 31 of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism is now out, with a great set of articles! If you're looking for the perfect place to publish a technical journal article on biblical textual criticism, I can highly recommend submitting here! I recently joined on the editorial board, and it is a well-run team with rigorous feedback and quick turnaround. The journal caters both to New Testament and Old Testament textual criticism, but OT contributions have been increasing considerably in recent years. The online format also works well for heavily data-driven articles (with supplementary material) and articles dealing with cutting-edge digital technologies. And all of the articles are published Open Access! Check it out, for the content and for your next text-critical article!

Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary

The Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary is now available online. They also display the standard CAD and AHw lexicons alongside their searches. This looks to be a very valuable research tool.

HT Agade

Phoenician/Punic Inscription Database

Mary Kate Lichty posts about the addition of Phoenician and Punic inscriptions in the Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources database.

Ska on Textual Variants in Gen 18

Jean-Luis Ska has an interesting article that includes discussions of several textual variants in Genesis 18 that might be of interest.

Klawans on Forgeries and Authentication

Jonathan Klawans has published a new book Biblical Forgery and Academic Authentication: Persisting Patterns of Guile and Gullibility on forgeries and the sketchy role scholars sometimes play in authentication of unprovenanced materials. It sounds like an interesting read for those who work with manuscripts, because there is a good chance someone will approach you at some point to authenticate a find. I can't even remember how many 3000-year-old Torah scrolls from Turkey have ended up in my inbox. It's good to think about these issues before they come up, rather than after the fact.

From the website:

• Informs, for the first time, on a wide-range of biblical forgery cases
• Focuses on issues relating to academic authentication: why scholars fall for forgeries and the poor arguments used to authenticate
• Introduces forgery studies and proposes a new "scale of authenticity," from 1 to 5

Biblical Forgery and Academic Authentication describes and decries the roles academics have played in the authentication of biblical forgeries. The most notorious recent incident is surely the 2016 publication of thirteen minuscule Dead Sea Scroll fragments displayed in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, quickly determined to be clever forgeries. Additional episodes range from Cyrus Gordon's 1970s authentications of supposedly ancient Hebrew inscriptions discovered in America to more recent trusting re-evaluations of the suspicious Deuteronomy manuscripts offered for sale by Moses Wilhelm Shapira in 1883.

While various articles and books have focused on one incident or another, no recent monograph has tried to grasp the larger, repeating dynamic of academic naiveté among biblical scholars. Nor has any work on forgery to date isolated and illustrated the distinct role played by the academic authenticator-a figure who stands between forgers and skeptics, neither forging nor criticizing the artifacts they encounter and endorse. The inherently controversial act of authenticating unprovenanced finds occasionally coincides with other broken norms (undue secrecy, insufficient disclosures, at times with money involved). This book sheds new light on long-resolved forgery cases, to tip the balance in some open cases, and to expose the ethical and intellectual lapses that permit the current situation to persist and fester.

Reconstructed Koine Pronunciation

Our church has been reading through the Bible this year in a reading plan, and we have now started going through the New Testament. After looking at some possible audio Greek NTs, I started listening to Ben Kantor's readings of the NT books using a reconstructed Koine pronunciation. I had the opportunity to get to know Ben better this September, so it was great to see these resources freely available online and learn more about his reconstruction.

What does a question of Greek language learning pedagogy have to do with OT textual criticism? More than you might think, actually. The reconstructed, historical Koine pronunciation he uses is reconstructed largely on the basis of ancient transliterations and spelling errors in ancient manuscripts, and it is meant to approximate Roman-period pronunciations (with some further developments for consistency). Where this becomes particularly important for our purposes is precisely in that scribes frequently made spelling errors (at least as we normally consider them) that match phonetic interchanges. So if you work with old Greek manuscripts, you will often encounter spelling errors like -τε for -ται that don't actually make sense semantically or graphically, but make perfect sense when you realize scribes pronounced both of these the same way. So even if you don't use this pronunciation in your Greek language pedagogy, it's still very useful to know how scribes actually pronounced things in order to make sense of their manuscripts and spelling practices.

Why aren't Torah scrolls vocalized?

Eliav Grossman has a great short article on why late antique rabbis resisted the vocalization and accentuation of Torah scrolls and instead chose to further distinguish them from the mundane by adding scribal flourishes to several letters. He concludes that it is largely a resistance to contemporary codex culture and the challenge of the Karaites who stressed biblical interpretation over rabbinic tradition.