New Post on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Literary Criticism

Ancient Jew Review has published my short discussion on the relevance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to pentateuchal criticism, entitled Reflections on the Textual Development of the Pentateuch in Light of Documented Evidence. There is much more to say about this important topic, and we could (and should) easily get bogged down in details, but this is intended to give a brief summary of what I think the DSS tell us about some important principles of textual development.

RBL Reviews

The most recent volume of the Review of Biblical Literature has the following reviews of interest:

James H. Charlesworth, Lee Martin McDonald, and Blake A. Jurgens, eds.
Sacra Scriptura: How “Non-canonical” Texts Functioned in Early Judaism and Early Christianity
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=9720
Reviewed by Tobias Nicklas

Eric J. Tully
The Translation and Translator of the Peshitta of Hosea
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=10382
Reviewed by Jerome A. Lund

Interview with Natalio Fernández Marcos

William Ross has a nice interview with Natalio Fernández Marcos to commemorate LXX day 2017. :)

Marieke Dhont on LXX Manuscripts in the Vatican Library

Marieke Dhont has an interesting blog post on LXX manuscripts in the Vatican library that might be of interest!

Hebrew University Announces the Discovery of Qumran Scroll Cave 12

My wife pointed out to me last night that Hebrew University just published a press release announcing the discovery of a 12th scroll cave near Qumran. Apparently the excavators found numerous scroll jars, some linen used for wrapping the scrolls, and one piece of parchment probably from a scroll. They are currently trying to discover whether the parchment has any writing on it or not. They also found iron pickaxe heads from looters in the 1950s, all of which leads them to conclude that the cave originally contained DSS, but that they were all looted. This potentially throws further into question the already tenuous identification of the provenance of many of our scroll fragments, as it is entirely possible that some of them came from this 12th cave.

Kratz on Insights into the Growth of Biblical Literature from the Dead Sea Scrolls

Reinhard Kratz has an interesting article Insights into the Growth of Biblical Literature from the Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Jew Review. Keep an eye out for more similar articles soon, because Andy Perrin made an arrangement to publish with AJR several articles from different contributors that he had been collecting for an online platform that had to be abandoned with the passing of Peter Flint.

HT Agade