Faculty Publications, Classics and Religious Studies Department

How to Throw a Spear on a Sling

Thomas Nelson Winter — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:31:04 PST

When javelin throwers are told to be ready, Xenophon's phrasing appears, for instance, "He ordered the targeteers to carry javelin on strap, and the bowmen to hold arrow on string" (Anabasis 5.2, Rouse tr.). This context shows that the spear-throwers' readiness to throw, paralleling the archer with arrow nocked, was some preparation with a strap, sling, or thong. In addition to the warfare usage, Greek hunters also used a sling with their hunting spears. The hunter in Achilles Tatius 2.34 narrates, "I wound the thongs on my javelin ... " (Winkler tr.)

I owe to my former student Donald K. Arp this observation: a culture that develops an advanced throwing weapon does not develop archery: consider the aborigines of Australia with boomerang and woomera, and the South American Indians who use the atlatl. We might also ask why the Greeks developed no tradition of archery, except for Crete. In addition to the person-to-person machismo of Greek infantry combat, there may be the following reason why the Greeks never developed a tradition of archery. The Greeks did possess an advanced throwing weapon. Throwing a spear on a sling turns out to be extremely effective, accurate, and satisfying. Experimentation confirms it.

Demonstrations to my Ancient Warfare students have been in a very open, carefully chosen and monitored part of campus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Retrospective and Prospective

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:13:09 PDT

The Dead Sea Scrolls—in the popular imagination, the very name conjures up scandal, intrigue and mystery. Tales of illicit excavations, clandestine purchases, and midnight trips to Beirut, all with the sound of gunfire crackling in the background, abound in the lore of the Scrolls and the scholars associated with them. While visions of Roland de Vaux as a French Indiana Jones may be the product of an overheated imagination, the actual story of the discovery of the Scrolls is nevertheless an exciting one in the annals of archaeology.

To say that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized the study of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism is to repeat what has become a well-worn cliché. But clichés, though trite, are often true, and, in fact, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized the study of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism.

Buddhist Contributions to the Question of (Un)mediated Mystical Experience

Yaroslav Komarovski — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:48:34 PDT

In this article, I address divergent Buddhist positions on conceptual and non-conceptual understanding of reality and the process of transition from the former to the latter. My discussion is anchored in the context of a well-known problematic issue in the field of religious studies, namely, the question of (un)mediated mystical experience. Connecting uniquely Buddhist philosophical and contemplative perspectives with the questions debated in contemporary studies of mysticism, I argue that Buddhism can make significant contributions to that field. Not only does it provide refined models of mind, contemplative processes, and other elements that help us understand certain mystical experiences, but it also encourages us to rethink the very meaning of “mediation,” “ineffability,” “experience,” and other categories used in discussions of mysticism. The application of the category of mystical experience to Buddhist traditions thereby problematizes that category itself, simultaneously suggesting new meanings and perspectives. Far from being passive objects of contemporary scholarly Euro-American discourse on this issue, Buddhist traditions can actively engage, challenge, and modify that discourse.

Research into specificities of experiences, insights, and realizations articulated by Buddhists themselves and interpreted from within the context of Buddhist worldviews and practices has much more to offer to the study of mysticism and mystical experiences than the one that starts with generalizations about mysticism across diverse religions grouped under such categories as “theistic,” “non-theistic,” and so forth. For example, most Buddhists would disagree that such key Buddhist experiences as realization of ultimate reality and awakening or “enlightenment” are accessible to those who have not undergone specific types of Buddhist training and conditioning. At the same time, they also agree on similarities or sameness of certain experiences across Buddhist traditions. That consensus in its turn is often interwoven with fierce polemics against seeming flaws of Buddhist traditions disagreeing with one’s own in the areas of contemplation, identification of reality, results of meditative practice, and so forth. Studying these elements across Buddhist traditions and analyzing how Buddhists themselves approach such differences, similarities, uniqueness, and diversity will greatly contribute to a more nuanced overall understanding of mysticism and mystical experiences.

In particular, I argue that if the category of “mystical experience” is applicable to Buddhism at all, the direct realization of ultimate reality (Skt. paramārthasatya) or emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā) should be treated as one of the highest expressions of that experience in the Buddhist context because of its supreme soteriological value as the only direct antidote to impediments to awakening. Likewise, because that realization both transcends and destroys conceptuality, mundane mentality, and dualistic thinking, it best approximates the category of “unmediated mystical experience,” if such a category has any relevant use in the Buddhist context. Correspondingly, because the process of direct realization of ultimate reality is one of the most challenging and important topics of Buddhist philosophical and contemplative theory and practice, the study of different approaches to accessing that realization directly bears upon and promises to contribute to the question of (un)mediated mystical experience. Therefore, although many elements involved in this polemical issue are uniquely Buddhist, their analysis can help us to achieve a better and more nuanced understanding of the issue of (un)mediated mystical experience. While only briefly addressing other forms of mystical experience in Buddhism, I will be targeting the issue of the process of realization of ultimate reality throughout this article.

Review of Schiffman & VanderKam, eds., Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:49:06 PDT

The aim of the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to its editors, is “to encompass all scholarship on the scrolls to date, making use of the research of many scholars of international reputation” (x). The word “scrolls” is used here in its broad meaning to refer to all the collections of ancient manuscripts found in the region of the Dead Sea and the Judaean wilderness in the twentieth century. These collections include the Qumran Scrolls, the Samaria Papyri, the Bar Kokhba texts, Masada and Khirbet Mird. Thus, although the Encyclopedia is more limited in geographical and chronological scope than, say, a biblical encyclopedia, a wider variety of topics is covered than would be the case if the editors had chosen to limit the Encyclopedia to the Qumran Scrolls. To produce the entries on this wider range of topics, the editors have assembled a group of contributors who are, as they state, of international repute, coming not only from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (as would be expected in an English-language encyclopedia), but also Germany, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Spain and Switzerland. Although many of these contributors are known as specialists in Qumran studies, others are from unrelated fields such as the morphological sciences or ethnobotany. The resulting collection of articles is truly “encyclopedic” in scope, ranging from expected topics such as “Essenes,” to the unexpected “Flora of Judea.”

Women in Wisdom Tradition: Review of Carol Fontaine, Smooth Words: Women, Proverbs and Performance in Biblical Wisdom

Sidnie White Crawford — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:30:31 PDT

Smooth Words is a well-researched and entertaining, if somewhat uneven, book on women in the Wisdom tradition in ancient Israel. Fontaine, a faculty member at a small Protestant seminary in Newton, MA, writes with her students constantly in mind, her interactions with them informing her scholarship throughout the book. She is also in dialogue with other scholars in the fields of Wisdom literature and feminist scholarship, a dialogue that gives the book academic rigor and depth.

Shakya Chokden’s Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhāga: “Contemplative” or “Dialectical”?

Yaroslav Komarovski — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:04:02 PDT

This reconciliation of the dialectical and contemplative approaches to the buddha-essence is related to and closely resembles Shakchok’s reconciliation of the two approaches to ultimate reality advocated respectively by Nihsvabhāvavāda (ngo bo nyid med par smra ba, “Proponents of Entitylessness”) system of Madhyamaka and Alīkākāravāda (rnam rdzun pa, “False Aspectarians”) system of Yogācāra. These approaches in turn are connected respectively to the explicit teachings (dngos bstan) of the second dharmacakra (chos ’khor, “Wheel of Dharma”) and the definitive teachings (nges don, nītārtha) of the third dharmacakra that he also presents in a reconciliatory manner. In the same way as the teachings of the last two dharmacakras, as well as the Nihsvabhāvavāda and Alīkākāravāda systems that derive from them, come to the same point, the dialectical and contemplative traditions also come to the same point. This point is the above-mentioned naturally pure primordial mind luminous by nature, the ultimate reality. In Shakchok’s opinion, application of non-affirming negations is a powerful tool for accessing direct realization of that reality, while its identification as primordial mind (ye shes, jñāna) is important for maintaining that realization and turning it into the basis of unfolding positive qualities on the path to buddhahood. When in the passage above Shakchok says that the two traditions are not contradictory, and when he reconciles the two last dharmacakras together with Alīkākāravāda and Nihsvabhāvavāda, he is not arguing that their words are non-contradictory. They obviously are! Nevertheless, those systems are non-contradictory in terms of complementing each other in getting access to and maintaining realization of the ultimate reality of primordial mind.

Rolling Around: Paris by Night

Thomas Nelson Winter — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:52:58 PDT

Riddle: What’s the difference between Lincoln, Nebraska and Paris, France?

1 In Paris, you're can skate in the streets!
2 If you see police on rollerskates in Lincoln, you're dreaming!
3 The Louvre is in Paris, and the whole block north of it is an asphalt plaza open to skating every night of the summer.
4 In Paris every Friday night at 10, a river of skaters floods through a 20-25K course, leaving the occasional misplaced motorist cowering by the curb.

Philosemitism and Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1620)

Stephen G. Burnett — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:03:53 PDT

Jonathan Israel argues in his seminal work European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (1985) that the early modern period marked a distinctive phase in the historical experience and consciousness of the Jews of Western Europe. He contends that the key factor that paved the way for these changes was the "political and spiritual upheaval which engulfed European culture as a whole by the end of the sixteenth century", above all what he terms the "Catholic-Protestant deadlock". The Protestant Reformation, which began in Wittenberg but quickly divided into several competing forms of Protestantism, evoked a Catholic Reformation in response. Polemicists from these emerging Christian confessional churches were not slow to portray their theological opponents as demonic enemies of the one true God, but they all agreed that Judaism was a false religion, and that the Jews themselves were stubborn rebels against God. Yet the sixteenth century also saw the birth and explosive growth of Christian Hebrew scholarship, supported and encouraged by the leaders of these same confessional churches.

Christian interest in Hebrew and in the literature of Judaism has long been identified as a feature of early modern European Philosemitism, beginning with the pioneering book of Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock (1952), and continuing in the works of Shmuel Ettinger, Jonathan Israel, and David Katz. Yet scholarly agreement that Philosemitism existed in the early modern period has not necessarily extended to its existence during the Reformation. Indeed, Heiko Oberman asserted, "Philosemitism does not exist in the sixteenth century, and among the Christians friends of Jews are rare exceptions." I will argue in this paper that in fact Christian Hebraism in the Reformation era did at times foster a nascent form of Philosemitism that would become more important in the mid-late seventeenth century.

Johannes Buxtorf Westphalus und die Erforschung des Judentums in der Neuzeit

Stephen G. Burnett — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:50:36 PDT

Wenn vom "Anfang der Erforschung des Judentums" die Rede ist, geht es meistens um die Wissenschaft des Judentums im 19. Jahrhundert. Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger und andere Gründerväter der Wissenschaft des Judentums haben es als ihre Aufgabe angesehen, die Religion, Geschichte, Literatur und Sprachen der Juden und deren Erforschung auf eine neue Basis zu stellen. Das bedeutet auch, dass sie einen neuen Wissenschaftsapparat schaffen mussten, vor allem Lexika, Nachschlagewerke, Bibliographien und Monographien zu bestimmten Themen wie z. B. dem jüdischen Gottesdienst. Diese Arbeit war notwendig, nicht nur weil sie manchmal "politische" Zwecke erfüllen (etwa Leopold Zunz' Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden [1837]) oder weitere wissenschaftliche Arbeiten unterstützen sollte, sondern auch weil es innerhalb der akademischen Kreise schon eine "wissenschaftliche Literatur” über das Judentum gab. Diese Literatur stammte vor allem von den christlichen Hebraisten des Reformationszeitalters und aus der Zeit der protestantischen Orthodoxie. Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, Alexander Kohut und andere jüdische Gelehrte dieser Zeit mussten sich zuerst mit der bereits existierenden Literatur auseinandersetzen, um sie entweder zu korrigieren oder zu ersetzen. Unter den christlichen Hebraisten des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts darf man Johannes Buxtorf Westphalus (den Älteren) als einen der wichtigsten Experten in Fragen des Judentums und dessen Erforschung bezeichnen. Man könnte ihn sogar als einen der Begründer der jüdischen Studien bezeichnen, auch wenn deren Gestalt der christlichen Orthodoxie entspricht.

Johannes Buxtorfs Charakterisierung des Judentums: Reformierte Orthodoxie und Christliche Hebraistik

Stephen G. Burnett — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:18:22 PDT

Die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit dem Judentum erhielt durch Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629) eine neue Perspektive. Obwohl sein Zugang durch die Theologie der Orthodoxie geprägt war, zeigte er sich augerordentlich gut informiert über das Judentum. Seine regelmäßigen Kontakte zu Juden und seine tiefe Vertrautheit mit der jüdischen Literatur gehen zurück auf seinen Lehrauftrag als Hebräisch Professor an der Baseler Universität, auf seine Tätigkeit als Zensor der Stadt Basel für Hebräische Druckwerke und auf seine Vertretung der Waldkirch-Druckerei von 1596 bis 1612. Buxtorf lebte und wirkte in einer Zeit, in der jüdisch-christliche Kontakte einen “Zweck” haben mussten, wie Jacob Katz herausgestellt hat. Dennoch besaß er weit mehr persönliche Kontakte zu Juden als andere christliche Hebraisten. Infolgedessen konnte er bei der Einschätzung jüdischer Überzeugungen, Bräuche und Zeremonien auf Gespräche, persönliche Erfahrungen und auf die Schriften der Juden selbst zurückgreifen. Buxtorfs Begegnung mit Juden und dem Judentum ist am besten dokumentiert für den allerersten Teil seines beruflichen Lebensweges. Dies ist die Zeit um 1603, als er sein erstes und einziges Buch über das Judentum mit dem Titel Juden Schul herausgab.

Jüdische Vermittler des Hebräischen und ihre christlichen Schüler im Spätmittelalter

Stephen G. Burnett — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:26:04 PST

Bruder Konrad Pellikan, ein Franziskanermönch, war das heroische Beispiel eines christlichen Autodidakten der hebräischen Sprache. Im Jahre 1499 fing er sein Studium des Hebräischen auf der Basis seiner Analyse des hebräischen Bibeltextes mit einer wortwörtlichen lateinischen Übersetzung der späteren Prophetenbücher und auch mit den transkribierten Versen von Jesajas, die sich in Petrus Nigris Stella Messiae befanden, an. Im Juli des folgenden Jahres hatte er bei einem Besuch in Tübingen von Reuchlin eine Erklärung der Nennform (Infinitiv) des Verbs bekommen. Im August besuchte er den Ulmer Priester Johannes Böhm. Dieser stellte ihm zwei handschriftliche Fragmente von Moses Kimhis Grammatik zur Verfügung, damit Pellikan sie kopieren konnte. Als er im Dienst des Franziskaner Ordens reiste, besuchte er andere Gelehrte und Bibliotheken, um weitere Hebräischkenntnisse zu gewinnen und auch um hebräische Handschriften zu lesen und zu kopieren. Seine grammatikalische Skizze der hebräischen Sprache ist schon 1504, drei Jahre vor Reuchlins Rudimenta, im Druck erschienen. Trotz all seiner Anstrengungen brauchte er schliesslich doch jüdische Hilfe, um seine Kenntnisse zu verbessern. Im Jahre 1513 besuchte er den Unterricht bei Matthäus Adrianus, einem getauften Juden aus Spanien. Auch Pellikan, der Autodidakt des Spätmittelalters, musste jüdische Hilfe in Anspruch nehmen, um Fortschritte zu erzielen.

Later Christian Hebraists

Stephen G. Burnett — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:03:32 PST

Christian Hebrew scholarship as an academic discipline was born during the sixteenth century. The founding of chairs of Hebrew language at European universities, the emergence of Hebrew presses to supply the needs of Christian customers, the willingness of some Jewish experts to instruct Christian pupils, and above all the humanist motivation for a return to the sources of the Christian faith together made Hebrew education possible for greater numbers of Christian scholars than ever before. The majority of these scholars had only a smattering of Hebrew, and those such as Conrad Pellican, and Paul Fagius who could read and understand the Targums and medieval Jewish Bible commentaries were relatively rare. The second edition of the Biblia rabbinica of Bomberg, Mikra'ot gedolot (1524-25), contained enough texts and aids to more than meet the needs of most Christian Hebraists, and parts of it such as the Masorah remained a closed book to them.

Over the next two centuries, several remarkable Hebraists developed the conceptual tools to evaluate the received Hebrew Bible text both as a document with a transmission history and a text whose language could also be evaluated in light of other Semitic languages. The two Buxtorfs, father and son, provided the intellectual foundation for these developments by producing scholarly aids in the form of grammars and dictionaries of Hebrew of far higher quality than had been available previously, and above all by publishing a Latin language manual to introduce Christian students to the intricacies of the Masorah. Thanks to his exposure to Arabic, Louis Cappel could conceive of a Semitic language that did not require vowel points to be read and understood. By the end of his career Cappel provided trenchant arguments demonstrating that the paratextual elements of the masoretic text (including its vocalization) could not have been written by the original biblical authors, and therefore only the consonantal text was canonical. Albert Schultens, also a student of Arabic, revolutionized the practice of comparing Hebrew with other Semitic languages by proposing that Hebrew and Arabic were "twin sister" languages, both descendents of the primordial language. By the end of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Kennicott and Giovanni de Rossi would explore the Hebrew Bible manuscript tradition through Europe-wide surveys of biblical manuscripts and by publishing summaries of textual variations present in over a thousand manuscripts and printed Hebrew Bibles. These philological breakthroughs when taken together resulted in the birth of both textual criticism and comparative philology as sub disciplines of biblical studies.

Review of Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Craig A. Evans and Peter W. Flint

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:44:42 PST

Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls is the first volume of a new series, Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature, being published under the auspices of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. The volume is a collection of eight essays presented at the first public Symposium of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute on September 30, 1995; it also contains an introduction by the editors Evans and Flint, the transcript of a panel discussion and a select bibliography. The essays are aimed at a public, nonspecialist audience, and thus provide rather more background and explanation than would be needed by a scholarly reader. As with any collection of symposium papers, some are of better quality than others. All of the essays take as their subject some aspect of eschatology or messianism, but not all are directly concerned with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Review of Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965. Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada, by Shemaryahu Talmon; and The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada, by Yigael Yadin.

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:42:33 PST

This is the sixth volume of the final report of the late Yigael Yadin’s excavations on Masada from 1963-1965. The trustees of Yadin’s literary legacy, the late N. Avigad, J. Amiran, and A. Ben-Tor, are publishing not only the final reports on Masada, but also on Hazor and Nahal Hever. They are to be commended for the fine quality of their work. The present volume includes the publication of the fragmentary Hebrew manuscripts found on Masada, which Yadin entrusted to Prof. Shemaryahu Talmon of the Hebrew University before his death in 1984. These documents include seven biblical manuscripts: one manuscript of Genesis (MasGen), two manuscripts of Leviticus (MasLev^{a & b}), one of Deuteronomy (MasDeut), one of Ezekiel (MasEzek), and two of Psalms (MasPs^{a & b}). Also included are two manuscripts of what Talmon refers to as “Bible- Related Compositions” (MasapocrGen, which is not related to the Qumran Genesis Apocryphon, in spite of its title, and MasapocrJosh), four “Fragments of Extra-Biblical Works” (MasJub, MasShirShabb, and two unidentified works), and one papyrus document, “A Text of Samaritan Origin.” The chapter on MasShirShabb or “Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice” is a reprint of the original publication by Carol Newsom and Yigael Yadin. Finally, the volume issues a revised edition of Yadin’s original The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem, 1965), with updated “Notes on the Reading” by E. Qimron and a bibliography by F. García Martínez. This is an important contribution to the corpus of the texts from the Judaean desert, and the student of the late Second Temple period will find much of interest.

Review of Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by John J. Collins and Robert A. Kugler.

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:40:19 PST

This volume is part of a series entitled Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature, edited by P. Flint, M. Abegg, Jr., and F. García Martínez. The aim of the series is to make “available to readers at all levels the best of current Dead Sea Scrolls research.” The collection of essays gathered in this volume succeeds in that goal admirably.

The volume grew out of a conference at Trinity Western University on April 24, 1999 (the editors are thus to be congratulated on bringing the volume to publication rapidly). The introduction, written by John J. Collins, gives an overview of scholarship on the religion of the Scrolls beginning with the publication of Helmer Ringgren’s 1963 book The Faith of Qumran: The Theology of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Fortress Press; Swedish edition 1961). According to Collins, discussion of the religious ideas of the Dead Sea Scrolls up until the early 1990s centered on a few texts: the Rule of the Community, the Damascus Document, the Hodayot, the Pesharim, and the War Scroll. With the publication of the majority of the fragmentary texts from Qumran in the early 1990s, the textual landscape changed; new questions began to be asked and new solutions proposed. The most far-reaching of the changes was a new appreciation for the relationship of the Dead Sea Scrolls with other strands of Judaism, which gave the rabbinic evidence a new prominence. This prominence sometimes worked to the detriment of the Scrolls’ previously observed ties to early Christianity. As we begin a new decade and a new century of Qumran research, Collins argues that scholars must “do justice both to [the Dead Sea sect’s] continuity with Jewish tradition and to its distinctive innovations; to its affinities both with early Christianity and with rabbinic Judaism” (p. 5). Collins sees the affinities with early Christianity in the areas of messianic expectation, judgment after death, and apocalyptic thought, while the Scrolls’ religious ideals and ethical values are closer to rabbinic Judaism. The essays in this volume tackle all of those topics and more.

Review of The Dead Sea Scrolls, Fifty Years after Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997, edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam; executive editor Galen Marquis

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:37:34 PST

Occasionally a volume appears that is almost impossible to review, whether because the material it presents is completely new, the subject matter is so esoteric, or the material is so eclectic that it cannot be absorbed in a single review. The latter is the case with the present volume, which contains over 100 articles by scholars from the United States, Israel, Canada, and Europe. The subject matter is the finds from the Judaean Desert—not only the written remains but also the material, biological, and architectural remains as well. The written remains include the Qumran scrolls (popularly referred to as the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Wadi ed-Daliyeh papyri, the Nahal Hever and Wadi Murrabaçat collections, and the fragments found at Masada, as well as various individual finds from the region. The other material remains come from the find sites of the written collections. The resulting volume is a vast compendium of Judaean Desert scholarship, including wide-ranging syntheses by established scholars in the field (e.g., “The Qumran Scrolls and the Biblical Text” by Eugene Ulrich) and small-scale studies of a single aspect of scrolls studies (e.g., “Some Observations on the Aramaic in Qumran: The 3rd Fem. Sing. Pronominal Suffix” by Ursula Schattner-Riesner). As the editors state, “The subjects covered were many and varied as is attested to in these conference volumes. The various genres of the literature reflected in the scrolls, the languages, the parallels in previously known compositions, the concepts, doctrines, and beliefs, the impact of historical events on the settlements in this region—all these aspects come to life in the scrolls and scroll fragments from what was once a dark period in modern knowledge of Judean history” (pp. xix–xx). As the reader can immediately grasp, this is not a volume that will be read and digested as a whole. Instead, different scholars will use different parts of the volume, depending upon their interests in various aspects of scrolls scholarship.

Review of Out of the Cave: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research, by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:35:46 PST

Edna Ullmann-Margalit, a professor of the philosophy of science 1 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has turned her interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls into a fascinating study of the scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. As she makes clear in the introduction (p. 17), Ullmann-Margalit makes no claim to expertise in the Scrolls, but is rather engaged in “second-order” scholarship; her subject is the study of the Scrolls. The book is divided into an introduction and three chapters: Chapter 1, “Writings and Ruins: The Essene Connection”; Chapter 2, “A Hard Look at ‘Hard Facts’: The Archaeology of Qumran”; and Chapter 3, “Sects and Scholars.” In the introduction, Ullmann- Margalit lays out her primary goal, which is “to subject to scrutiny the inner logic of the main theory of Qumran studies as well as of the rival theories.” The main theory is the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, which Ullmann-Margalit defines as follows: “the scrolls found in the caves [in the vicinity of Qumran] belonged to the sect of the Essenes and that the Essene center, or ‘motherhouse,’ was at the nearby site of Khirbet Qumran” (p. 23). As Ullmann-Margalit notes, this hypothesis can be broken down into three constituent elements, which she puts in the form of questions: Why Essenes? Why Qumran? Why a sect? (p. 16). Each of these questions is addressed in the following chapters.

Review of Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, eds. Michael O. Wise, Norman Golb, John J. Collins, and Dennis G. Pardee.

Sidnie White Crawford — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:33:53 PST

This volume brings together the papers given at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls held under the sponsorship of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the New York Academy of Sciences in New York December 14–17, 1992. The conference was unusual for an American Dead Sea Scrolls conference, inasmuch as it brought together scholars from the United States and a dozen other countries. This and the fact that the papers cover an extremely broad range of Qumran topics make the volume a valuable addition for college and university libraries and for scholarly reference shelves.

Review of Duane L. Christensen, Deuteronomy 21:10–34:12

Sidnie White Crawford — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:41:01 PST

This commentary, which covers Deut 21: 10-34:12, is the second volume of Duane Christensen’s massive work on Deuteronomy (the revised first volume. WBC 6A, encompasses 1:1–21:9) in the WBC series. The series is written from an evangelical Christian perspective, and each volume follows the same format, presenting an exposition of the text in the original language (Hebrew or Greek). Each volume contains an original translation by the author, with explicating notes and commentary. ... On the whole, however, C. has done a marvelous job distilling the vast field of Deuteronomic research into a usable commentary. This volume, along with its companion, is an important new addition to any collection of commentaries on Deuteronomy.

Review of Timothy K. Beal, The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation and Esther, and Timothy S. Laniak, Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther

Sidnie White Crawford — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:39:23 PST

These two recent books on the Book of Esther by young scholars illustrate the vitality of new methods of interpretation of the biblical text; at the same time, they raise questions about the limits of these new methods. Laniak, approaching the Book of Esther from an anthropological perspective, uses its categories of honor and shame. Beal uses postmodern critical theory to illuminate the shifting meanings of “self” and “other” in Esther. The two books have several things in common—rather surprisingly, given their very different orientations. Neither author gives much attention to the historical value of the Book of Esther; both approach it purely as a literary text, although Laniak (p. 3 n. 5) states that he does not count himself “among those who reject the book of Esther as a source of history.” Both authors use the MT as their primary text, with only passing reference to the LXX and the Greek alpha text, and both share an interest in later rabbinic interpretation of Esther. There, however, the similarities end.