SBL to publish volumes in Brill's Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series

Bob Buller, Editorial Director at the Society of Biblical Literature, has sent me this very interesting note, which I am happy to be able to announce to the readers of this blog. Great news for all Philonists:

The Society of Biblical Literature and Brill Academic Publishers are pleased to announce a new copublication agreement for all current and future volumes in Brill's highly praised Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series. According to the terms of the arrangement, the SBL will publish a paperback edition of each title in the series two years after the publication of Brill's hardback edition. The first SBL volume, David T. Runia's Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses: Introduction, Translation and Commentary, is expected to release in spring 2005. It will be followed by volume 2 in the series, Pieter W. van der Horst's Philo's Flaccus: The First Pogrom, later in 2005.

The Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series aims to make Philo’s thought accessible to readers such as graduate students who are just beginning to read his works but also contains much material of interest to specialists in Hellenistic Judaism, ancient philosophy, and patristic literature. For additional information on the series, including a list of its editorial board, see the Brill website at http://www.brill.nl/ or http://www.nd.edu/~philojud/38.htm .

If you have questions or comments regarding the SBL publication of volumes in the series, please email SBL Editorial Director Bob Buller at Bob.Buller@sbl-site.org.

RPBS updated

My Resource Pages for Biblical Studies are updated today; a lot of outdated links have been corrected, and dead links removed. I have not, however, been able to check all of the several hundreds of links. Hence I am greatful for all who mail me about links that are still not working, or who has some new links to offer.
You can get a brief review of the links added by clicking here.

Off for Christmas; have a nice time!

I am off for Christmas; see you next year!

The picture above is snapped from a local webside (www.voldaveiret.no), who keeps us informed about the local weather foresights, and also posts beautiful pictures of the area I live in.

Hey, I almost forgot...

Hey, I almost forgot..., yesterday this WeBlog has been online for one year! It has been fun sometimes, boring other times, sometimes hard to keep up with stuff, othertimes: hm, what am I to post now.....

I hope visitors have found it useful to read; the comment field below is yours to use to say a word of 'Congratulations', or a holiday season greeting!! Then I might go on for another year.....

Greetings to all of you from snowy western Norway!

More on Philo's texts digitalised . . .

Acccording to my information there is some progress in the discussions about how the texts of Philo can be offered to the general public in digitalised and tagged form; both providers of Windows programs and Mac programs shall now be interested..

This is good news for all philonists; I am not directly involved in the process, but the guys behind the Philo Index are, and I do hope Kåre Fuglseth can keep us informed here on this PhiloBlog as the various issues get more settled. Stay tuned..

More on: How to read a scholarly paper..

As I have my part of responsibility for starting this discussion after the SBL in San Antonio, I would like to point you to the posting of Mark Goodacre on his NTGatewayBlog. He has a lot of good comments to offer. He seems to prefer a presentation of a paper rather than a reading, and especially if it is "spead-read", I really do agree. I may, however, have my reservations too: Reading a paper may be easier for those of us who have English as our second or third language, than 'presenting'. Furthermore, I do support the idea of Mark and Edward Cook that SBL, and similar organisations should offer some kind of advice to first-time presenters,- perhaps even to presenters in general.

BookReview of StPhA 2003

Among the most recently reviews posted by the Review of Biblical Literature, we find a review of Studia Philonica Annual 2003: Runia, David T., Gregory E. Sterling and Hindy Najman, editors, The Studia Philonica Annual: Law Stamped with the Seal of Nature: Law and Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy and Philo of Alexandria (Studia Philonic Annual 15; Brown Judaic Studies 337)
Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 2003, pp. 199 $39.95 This review is written by John R Levison.
In addition, the Review of Biblical Literature also contains another review of the same book, written by Lutz Doering. Check it out here.

Another search engine

Chris Lindgren from Direct Textbooks has been so kind as to e-mail me about a search engine I was not familiar with. The site searches book inventories from 100's of stores, book exchanges and book marketplaces to display price and availability. Also the site does not just search for textbooks but all books: http://www.directtextbook.com

Click here to see what it found on Philo of Alexandria.

Philo texts digitalised? Tagged?

On the The coding Humanist weblog there are some 'musings' about what group of texts are most relevant as background material for NT studies. On one list Philo is ranked 5th., on another 6th. Hm, have they ever read Philo?? :-) I would e.g., have ranked him above the NT apocrypha.

Second, there are suggestions about texts that should be made available in digitalized and tagged form for morphological searches. As stated in one posting; Philo is free in electronic translation, cheap in print translation (Yonge), reasonably priced in original language (Loeb), expensive in electronic Greek (TLG) and textual apparatus (Cohn-Wendland), and not available at all tagged for morphology (to my knowledge). I might add here that at the last SBL Annual Meeting, there were initial contacts between a software provider and persons involved in the Norwegian Philo Concordance project. As you may know from the homepage of the Norwegian Philo Concordance Project, the texts of Philo are already tagged, but they are not yet available for the general public.
I, for my part, would really do hope that the initial contact made in San Antonio will result in a project that makes the texts of Philo available to all in a digitalised and tagged format.

If any of you who reads this would be interested in seeing such a project fulfilled, please leave a note of support in the comment field below.

More on the Philo Index

I don't use to promote an item on my weblog in this way, but I might make an exception this time. As mentioned in a posting below by Kåre Fuglseth, the Philo Index is now out out of print. Hence, if you want to get a copy, you have to hurry.
It may still be available in some stores, as e.g., Amazon. Today I got a message telling that Dovebook also has some exemplars left which they sell out at a great discount: Limited item! Borgen, Peder; K Fuglseth, R Skarsten,
Philo Index: A Complete Greek Word Index to the Writings of Philo of Alexandria
Publisher: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Quantity limited, still more than 20 in stock
Available in Hardcover. List: $55.00 - Dove: $27.99Go to Dovebook ; there may still be some available.

Philo and/or the Pseudepigrapha?

Triggered by a posting by Eric Sowell, on his the Coding Humanist , Jim Davila has a lengthy and well-formed comment on his PaleoJudaica WeBlog on what writings would be the most important to study as a backdrop to the NT times. He also manages to throw in some pennies for his forthcoming book. :-) I may have to buy that!

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities

A recent book review on Bryn Mawr Classical Review may be of interest to Philonists and other students of Diaspora Judaism: Christine Hayes,
Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 309. ISBN 0-19-515120-8. $45.00.
Reviewed by Lily Vuong, McMaster University. Excerpts from the review: "In this important book, Christine Hayes explores how the impurities of Gentiles were understood in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature. One of her main arguments is that the "didactic pair" of pure/impure was used both to describe Jewish culture and to inscribe socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. H. focuses on ancient debates over conversion and intermarriage. In her view, these debates reflect different ideas about Gentile impurity and were key factors in the formation of Jewish sects in the Second Temple period (536 BCE- 70CE) as well as in the separation of Christianity from what became Rabbinic Judaism."

". . . this book is a superb piece of scholarship. H. here offers a new perspective on the phenomenon of Jewish sectarianism in the Second Temple period, early Jewish self-identification, and Jewish relationships with non-Jews. At times H's halakhic discussions can be difficult to follow, yet, overall, her book is extremely well researched, skilfully argued, and articulately written. Particularly helpful are her detailed discussion of debates in the appendix and her accessible glossary. Readers interested in purity laws, Jewish and Christian self-definition, and relations between Jews and Gentiles will benefit greatly from H's careful study."

Philo is dealt with chapter 3-4: In chapters three and four, H. traces these ideas through a variety of Second Temple Jewish sources, including texts from the Apocrypha (Tobit, Wisdom of Ben Sira, Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees), Pseudepigrapha (1 Enoch, Jubilees, 3 Maccabees, 3rd and 5th Sibylline Oracles, Testament of Levi), the Dead Sea Scrolls (War Scroll, Community Rule, 4QFlorilegium, Miqtsat Ma'aseh haTorah), and the works of Josephus and Philo. H. holds that there is strong biblical influence on Second Temple literature; here too Gentile impurity is potentially moral but never ritual. In respect to genealogical impurity, H. argues for a distinction between different texts. Like the Pentateuch, Josephus and Philo seem not to see non-Jewish genealogy as an obstacle to conversion. By contrast, Jubilees and 4QFlorilegium build on Ezra's concept of "holy seed;" for their authors, true conversion of Gentiles is impossible and intermarriage unacceptable.

Google's Scholar

Google has launched a new search feature, called Scholar, directly related to scholarly searches on the Internet. It is still available as a Beta version, but it digs up a lot of interesting material.

Here is what I found when searching for Philo of Alexandria. Click on Philo! It obviously locates books, references, postings, webpages etc etc concerning your search words. I would have liked very much if they could find some way of ordering or clustering their findings; now you have to skim through a lot of different items.

The Vivisimo search engine (www.vivisimo.com) is much better better when it comes to clustering. See here what it found on Philo of Alexandria.

Here are some examples of what I found on Google's Scholar (and did not remember where to find):

Margaret Graver
Philo of Alexandria and the Origins of the Stoic Πρoπαθειαι (abstract)
Phronesis 44 (4): 300-325, August 1 1999

James T.
Pilo on circumcision.
S Afr Med J. 1976 Aug 21;50(36):1409-12.
more info here.

And this article I definitely did not know were available on the Internet in a full-text .pdf version:
Peder Borgen,
Two Philonic Prayers and their Contexts: An Analysis of Who is the Heir of Divine Things (Her.) 24-29 and Against Flaccus (Flacc.) 170-175.
New Testament Studies 45 (1999): 291-309.


Second Thoughts:
The Borgen article is probably available only to those subscribing to New Testament Studies.

Old Fashioned ways...(II)

Things have slowed down on this blog since the SBL Annual Meeting and my trip to the US. I really had to take some days off, and when I got back to office, it was a "thousand" things to take care of...

When I finally reached 'the promised land' ( see on my flight problems below), I had some nice days at both San Antonio, and then on Long Island at Thanksgiving,- not to speak about a nine-holes round of playing golf. Thanks brother! For the first time in my life I had the mixed experiences of using a golfcart on the course instead of walking. We don't use that in Norway; we are walkers.... :-)

Getting back home there was a lot of e-mails to skim through, and the BlogLines had a lot of interesting postings to read. I have 31 bloggers on my list, and I am impressed by how many postings some of the bibliobloggers are able to produce.

It was also interesting to discover that some of my comments about How to read a scholarly paper have elicited further comments:
First out were Mark Goodacre, then
David Meadows at RogueClassicism supported me in a passing comment,
then Edward Cook on his blog Ralph the Sacred River expanded on our comments, which then again was followed up by Stephen C. Carlsson on his Hypotyposeis, and expanded even more by Mark Goodacre on his NTGateway Blog. Marks comments on his own experiences when extemporating on his own paper are also valuable here; see here and here.

I am greatful for the responses, and am looking forward to upcoming sessions where presenters will be more aware of the audience getting hold of their main arguments then speedreading through a lagre manuscript, hoping to present all the nuances. I find Mark's and Edward Cooks comments very helpful. Mark's method may be difficult when reading very technical papers, and I know very well of the problem of not knowing how many attendants there will be, but handouts and/or some other visuals are most helpful.

And I fully support these remarks by Mark: The reason for my bringing this up in the first place is the idea that there is something necessarily superior, something more academically appropriate about reading a paper. This is the thing that I am struggling with. What I remain bothered about is the disjunction between the way we all work in our day-to-day lecturing and the way we behave at conferences. What I suspect is that one has simply not caught up with the other. We are in the habit of reading out papers not because we have thought it through and have decided that it is the best way to communicate with other scholars but because it is an academic convention, something we have all inherited, that we assume is the way to do things without question. A hundred years ago, I'd bet you'd hear most of your undergraduate lectures read-out by your lecturers. Under such circumstances, it was natural to read-out conference papers too. But now none of us read out lectures to undergraduates, do we? So this is how I am beginning to see it, with apologies if I am overstating the case. If we are comfortable lecturing ex tempore on a day-by-day basis, over a much longer time period (hour long lectures), on topics that are not always intimately related to our research (we all lecture on stuff we have never written on), to people less patient than scholars (undergraduate students), then surely it is a more straightforward thing to talk for 20-25 minutes to friendly faces on material we know intimately? I could not have said it any better, also when keeping in mind the comments of Ken Litwak added to that posting.