More Resources!

A few more useful things for Bible and ANE study have appeared up recently, and are worthy of notice.

1) The Reader’s Hebrew Bible I blogged about earlier is now available. I’ve had a copy for a few weeks, and dang if it isn’t useful. It really facilitates fast reading of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. I’ve been able to read all my Institute readings in Hebrew for the last few weeks.

Due to some computer glitch, it has a few pointing errors namely, segholate nouns with a particular accent were repointed as sere-seghol, but nothing serious. (PDF of those errata here.) Highly recommended.

2) Logos is up to some interesting things. There’s an Alpha (a basic, pre-Beta build) available of the program for Mac OSX now, which is great. Though it is an Alpha with many features not fully implemented yet and some bugs, it runs much much faster than on a PC.

3) Moreover, they’re releasing some good scholarly tools. We already had the 3-volume Context of Scripture from them. Now we’re getting the classic collection that many older books reference, Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts (or ANET, as often abbreviated.)

4) If the classic ANET weren’t enough, Logos is also publishing the 16-volume SBL collection of ANE Texts, Writings of the Ancient World, which often include besides translations and notes, original language transliterations. The collection includes Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Aramaic law codes, letters, ritual texts, mythology, and more.

5) They’ve also received licensing permission from SBL to release the last 26 years of the Journal of Biblical Literature in Logos format.

Now, anyone interested can download whole volumes of the journal from the SBL website. Why pay for them in Logos format? What advantage hath Logos format over PDF? In a word, searchability. I create collections in my Logos library, say one for ancient texts, one for journals, one for commentaries, and the default library is of every volume I have. The most useful thing, having done that, is looking for references. I can run a search on any collection which says, in essence, “pull up everything that references Genesis 3:27.” A few seconds later, I have links to my commentaries, books, articles, etc. which open up to the page where Genesis 3:27 is referenced. It’s incredibly useful.

Logos also has many resources for the interested non-scholar, much of it conservative and/or Evangelical-oriented, but those aren’t my focus here. Here’s the page of resources in the pipeline.

6) For you Akkadian lovers, both the massive Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD, downloadable volumes have an arrow to the right of the title) and the smaller blue Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (CDA) are now available in pdf form.

Both volumes are text-searchable scans, not just scanned photos. I note that the CDA link has been taken down “pending resolution of a claim of copyright infringement.” That’s why, when you see these things appear, you should download first and ask questions later 🙂

6) I also blogged in the past about the divine council, linking to a discussion between David Bokovoy and Michael Heiser. Bokovoy has an article in the current issue of the prestigious Journal of Biblical Literature on the topic of the council. Clearly, he’s doing work of recognizably scholarly quality, if JBL is publishing it. I know of one other LDS grad student with a forthcoming paper in JBL, and I’ll blog about it when it appears.