Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI

Welcome one and all to Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI. It feels a little weird to be posting this month’s carnival so soon after Tyler Williams posted Carnival XXX and in light of the various misdirections about where this month’s Carnival would appear, but no matter. Here is a look at some of the best posts for the month of June 2008.

This month’s carnival begins with the ancient Near East, where many bloggers posted insights this months. Duane Smith has a work in progress on a purported Gilagmesh Letter (here. here, here, and here). Alan Lenzi is making steady progress on his Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi project (with Amar Annus) and wrote on the meaning of the word rāšilūtu. Along the same Assyriological lines, Pete Bekins at בלשנת posted his thoughts on N.J.C. Kouwenberg’s paper “Gemination in the Akkadian Verb;” and C. Jay Crisostomo at mu-pàd-da reviewed Walter Bodine’s “Linguistics and Philology in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Languages” from the Lambdin festschrift Working With No Data. Finally, I posted on a new translation of “Adapa and the South Wind” that I’ll be using in class later this summer.

A nice transition from the ancient Near East generally to the Hebrew Bible more specifically might be found in Charles Halton‘s assessment of Karl van der Toorn’s “library hypothesis” of canonical composition. Another review by Pete Bekins focuses on Mark Smith’s classic The Origins and Development of the Waw-consecutive. Such constructive grammatical work comes in handy when addressing the barrage of translation posts this month between David Ker (here and here) and Jim West (here and here) on one side and John F Hobbins (here and here) and Richard A Rhodes (here) on another. This high spirited discussion meant that the usually incendiary inerrancy debate simmered down, even with posts by Michael S. Eiser (here, here, here and here ) and Peter Enns (here, here, here and here).

Moving into New Testament studies, James Gregory shared his thoughts on Ephesians 4:7 & 8 in a series that has been going through that whole letter, sentence by sentence. Kevin Edgecomb posted a five part series on the Gospel of the Pharisees (parts one, two, three, four and five) in an impressive blogging tour de force. James Crossley discussed the Nottingham conference on the Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth, which led Doug Chaplin to ruminate on issues of history, theology and the historical Jesus.

Finally, perhaps the best news of the month for biblical studies has been the return in earnest of DailyHebrew.com.

Beyond the canon comes word from the technologically hip. First off, J. P. van de Giessen created a biblioblogger search pluggin for Firefox 3 (the list of blogs it searches is here). Additionally, the Oriental Institute has an update on its digitized books project, which is a big help for those of us who haven’t been able to grab the funds for the last few volumes of the CAD. And perhaps most interestingly, the word came forth from many places this month that Society of Biblical Literature, in partnership with the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente, Universidad Católica Argentina (CEHAO/UCA), have established a new online, open-access monograph series of which Alan Lenski is one of the editors.

On a lighter note, John Hobbins is encouraging bibliobloggers to post on their favourite children’s books. So far Phil Sumpter has written on Piers Anthony’s Xanth series; Ros Clarke on Philip Pullman; Iyov has an introduction on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; and Chris Brady just published his thoughts on The Chronicles of Prydain (which he posted on July 1st, but I’m throwing it in anyway).

Finally, both Ed Cook and Charles Halton landed new teaching gigs. Congrats to you both!

The next Biblical Studies Carnival will be at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. For more information on the Carnival, including where to submit pieces and where it’ll be next, go here.