Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, and Various Near Eastern Texts

Two quick notes:

Non-LDS scholar Peter Flint gave a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls the other day at BYU. You can watch it or listen to the audio at Aquinas’ blog. (Hat tip to, uh, Aquinas.)

And Logos is doing it to me again. They’ve got two new databases, wheat amongst the chaff on the prepublication list, which means a reduced price is available before Logos finishes building the databases. (This link explains how the prepublication process works.)

The first database is a morphologically-tagged text of the Biblical Dead Sea Scroll texts. The sectarian texts have been around for a while in multiple electronic formats, but not the Biblical texts, which are useful for textual criticism, among other things.

The second database consists of the 16 volume Writings of the Ancient World series by the Society of Biblical Literature, whose conference rapidly approaches. (BYU has given money to some promising undergrads to attend this year.) This is a very good series of books, with different genres (legal texts, epistolary texts, ritual texts, etc.) and different groups (Ugaritic, Hittite, Mesopotamian, etc.) represented. I’ve used a few for classwork and research.

While they’re in prepublication status, the DSS go for $79, and the SBL volumes for $306. Clearly, I need more funding 🙂