DailyHebrew.com

John Cook and Robert Holmstedt have struck again with a new textbook, Biblical Hebrew: An Illustrated Introduction, moving in a completely different pedagogic direction than the majority of competing methods of learning Biblical Hebrew, including their own venture, Biblical Hebrew: A Student Grammar.  But don't discard your copy of Lambdin just yet, it is presently in draft form only, but looks to have great promise. 

From Sasson's List:

Hazor Law Code Fragments

The Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin have recovered two fragments of a cuneiform tablet preserving portions of a law code at Hazor.

The text parallels portions of the famous Law Code of Hammurabi, and, to a certain extent even the Biblical “tooth for a tooth”. The team is presently working its way down towards a monumental structure dating to the Bronze Age, where more tablets are expected to be found.

The tablet is currently being studied at the Hebrew University. More details to follow as soon as possible.

The excavations are sponsored by the Hebrew university and the Israel Exploration Society, and take place in the Hazor National Park.

The oldest known cuneiform tablet fragment from Jerusalem was recently found in a fill area of the Ophel according to Eliat Mazar, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Hebrew University excavations recently unearthed a clay fragment dating back to the 14th century BCE, said to be the oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem.

The tiny fragment is only 2 cm. by 2.8 cm. in surface area and 1 cm. thick and appears to have once been part of a larger tablet. Researchers say the ancient fragment testifies to Jerusalem’s importance as a major city late in the Bronze Age, long before it was conquered by King David.

In the article,  Wayne Horowitz indicates that it may have been part of the correspondence between Jerusalem and Egypt known from the Amarna tablets.

According to Horowitz, the high quality of the tablet piece indicates that it was most likely part of a message sent from a then-king of Jerusalem to the pharaoh in Egypt. Horowitz said that the fragment, which is made of Jerusalem clay, indicated that Jerusalem was one of the central cities of the area at the time.

The next part is referring to the Siloam Tunnel Inscription, which is of course a linear inscription in Ancient Hebrew and not a cuneiform tablet as the report indicates:

The most ancient piece of writing found in Jerusalem before the Ophel fragment was a tablet unearthed in the Shiloah water in the City of David, dating back to the eighth century BCE – nearly 600 years “younger” than the Ophel find.

 (HT: Sasson's List)

UPDATE 1: See Duane's comments for more on Jerusalem scribal traditions.

UPDATE 2: The AlphaGalileo.org article adds little by way of new information.

UPDATE 3:Christopher Rollston weighs in here (with a short addendum by John Huehnergard about a difficulty with the official reading/interpretation).

UPDATE 4: Seth Sanders clarifies nicely what is known about the situation in Late Bronze Age Jerusalem.

UPDATE 5: Seth strikes again bringing the topic of the Canaanite dialect of the Levantine Amarna Texts back into conversation.

For those interested in such things, the most recent edition (Autumn 2010) of the Journal of Semitic Studies contains an article which I co-authored: "A Revised Reading of a Nabataean Inscription from Umm Al-Jiml"

Happy reading!

40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible by Robert Plummer. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010. $17.99 (Amazon $12.23; Google Book Preview).

עֲשׂ֨וֹת סְפָרִ֤ים הַרְבֵּה֙ אֵ֣ין קֵ֔ץ

"There is no end to the making of many books"

-Qoheleth 12:12

This quotation is used regularly to lament the multiplicity of books made available by publishers and the poor quality of such books—this title, however, stands in contrast to the negative connotations of this dictum.

The purpose of the book is presented in the first paragraph of the Introduction: "[T]his book will serve as a textbook for an introductory Bible course at a college or seminary, but I endeavored to write so that the book will be beneficial to any curious Christian."  Further Plummer states: "My goal was to be accessible without being simplistic and scholarly without being pedantic, while always keeping an eye to practical questions and real-life application."  This is indeed a noble goal, and one which the author attained; his pastoral hand is seen in several sections particularly when providing answers to more difficult or controversial questions (see pp. 44-45 "Recommendations for Dealing with Difficult Texts").

The intended audiences are undergraduate and seminary students, but the book would be accessible by the lay-person or biblical novice.  With the exception of a few places, the jargon of biblical studies is either well-defined or excluded completely, which is a pleasant discovery for those of us who are not native Latin speakers or have lost our pocket German dictionaries.

Plummer outlines clearly his presuppositions of interpretation in the first few chapters: he understands the biblical text as "uniquely inspired and authoritative" (p. 17), follows a traditional evangelical Protestant model of the text and canon of the Bible (ch. 2-3, 6), and presents a concise understanding of inerrancy (ch. 4) with an apt warning: "Don't demand that the ancient writers conform to your expected standards" (p. 45).  An overview of the biblical manuscript evidence, both Old and New Testaments, is found in chapter 5, and chapter 6 provides a fair evaluation of different English translations contrasting the positive and negatives of translation methods in general.

One of the greatest strengths of this work is the 40 Questions about… format in which each chapter is centered on a question with short concise answers consisting of 5-12 typed pages, several reflection questions, and a selected bibliography.  According to the verso of the first leaf of the book, five titles are forthcoming in the series edited by Benjamin Merkle, bringing the total for the series to seven (including the previously published 40 Questions about Elders and Deacons [2007], authored by the series editor).

The dialectic-type argumentation structure is presented not piece-meal, but aptly organized with parts and sections each building upon one another toward the goal of leading the reader step-by-step to a clear model of biblical interpretation.  The four parts are grouped according to broad topics—"Getting Started: Text, Canon, and Translation", "Approaching the Bible Generally", "Approaching Specific Texts", and lastly "Issues in Recent Discussion" which is probably more in depth than the average reader will need, but provides an excellent starting point for further research and understanding popular and scholarly trends in contemporary biblical hermeneutics.  For the reader who is looking for answers to specific questions, the format also allows for movement between the parts with each chapter able to stand on its own (references to other chapters are kept at a minimum and do not distract from the prose).

Though Plummer is a New Testament professor, he does not feel limited to his specialty, but does well in providing both examples and solutions from the Hebrew as well as the Greek portions of the Bible. This practice, however, opens up criticism at points about some details suffering from the fact that mastery of both Old and New Testament studies (not to mention the secondary and tertiary fields of study) is impossible for any one individual; I do not wish to present a catalogue of typos or errors, but a few examples may be noted:

·         Chapter 2 "Chapter Divisions", even though the convention of delimiting chapters by number is decidedly modern, the oldest biblical manuscripts (those found near Qumran) show divisions similar, though not exactly corresponding, to the Masoretic open and closed paragraphs (marked by פתוחא and סתומא) demonstrating an ancient tradition of separating sense units.

·         Chapter 5 "The Old Testament", the Essenes Hypothesis is supported uncritically as the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, despite scholarly debate about the origin of these documents.

·         Chapter 6 "Old Testament Canon", Plummer states: "It seems clear that by the time of Jesus, most Jews were in agreement as to their own canon"; however, one finds debates in the first century Tannaitic literature (see particularly Yadayim, chapter 3) about the canonical status of at least two books—Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.

·         Chapter 9, an initial section before "The Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament" on The Use of the Old Testament in the Old Testament may be warranted. Examples of this may be Isaiah 2 and Micah 4, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22, Isaiah 36-39 and 2 Kings 18-20 (cf. 2 Chronicles 32), and for that matter Samuel/Kings and Chronicles.

·         Several places the bibliographic data could be expanded, noticeably absent but helpful would be E. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 1994 (ch. 2), E. Brotzman, Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction, Baker, 1993 (ch. 5), and A. Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism, Eerdmans, 2007 (ch. 29).

At bottom, Plummer provides an excellent, readable book with clear evangelical Christian leanings written for the non-specialist interested in a thorough grounding in biblical interpretation.  He brings together expansive material found previously only in multiple locations into one place with clear, concise prose and an excellent format.  40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible will certainly be found on my future Biblical Hermeneutics syllabuses.

H.H. Hardy II

The University of Chicago

Previous DH.com review: A Reader's Hebrew Bible