Monday, December 31, 2012

Hittite Epigraphic Findings in the Ancient Near East

http://www.hittiteepigraphs.com/index.html

From the home page:

The present web-site has been developed with the purpose of creating a general geographic map of the epigraphic findings belonging to the Hittite Kingdom (1600 – 1150 BC). The findings listed here concern texts, seals, and inscribed objects written either in Akkadic or Hittite.
Data come from more than 70 archaeological sites spread over a territory extending from the Western Anatolian coast to the Tigris valley and from the Northern Anatolian coast to the Syro-Lebanese border.
The web-site and its contents have been created and are currently curated by Dr. Dario Fossati. The page was realized as part of the project "Creazione di una mappa interattiva dei ritrovamenti epigrafici nei siti anatolici e siriani sotto controllo ittita" and has been supervised by Professor Franca Pecchioli Daddi of the University of Florence.
It is part of the research project PRIN 2009 "Modelli di costruzione fisica ed ideologica del territorio e identità culturali: città sacre, santuari, complessi funerari in Siria, Anatolia e Transcaucasia nelle Et� del Bronzo e del Ferro", supervised by Professor Stefania Mazzoni.

Digital Nestle-Aland 28

http://www.nestle-aland.com/en/read-na28-online/

The 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament has now been published. While the text is readable online, the critical apparatus is disappointingly not (freely that is).

Thursday, December 27, 2012

JANES -- Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society

http://www.jtsa.edu/Scholars_and_Research/JANES.xml

JANES is open access via The Jewish Theological Seminary. It appears as though its last publication was in 2009.

Friday, December 21, 2012

The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/about-the-project/the-digital-library

This site offers high-res digital scans of "thousands of scroll fragments." The fragments represent Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, and Latin in biblical and extrabiblical texts. The scans can be enlarged to a high magnitude.

Good for working on reading unpointed Paleo- and Classical Hebrew.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

3 new books from ASOR

MacDonald, Burton. East of the Jordan: Territories and Sites of the Hebrew Scriptures. ISBN 0-89757-031-6 p. viii + 287 Boston, MA: ASOR, 2000

Nakhai, Beth Alpert. Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel. ISBN O-89757-057-X p. x + 262 Boston, MA: ASOR, 2001.

Walls, Neal. Desire, Discord and Death: Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth. ISBN O-89757-055-3-X; 056-1 p. x + 262 Boston, MA: ASOR, 2001.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament (JESOT)

http://jesot.org/

This is a relatively new open-access, peer-reviewed journal. Note that it is not (at least yet) indexed by ATLA. Although the "scope" section (below) claims to fill a void, IBR has been doing the same sorts of things for some time, albeit with a focus on the current state of scholarship.

From the site:

Scope

Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament (JESOT) is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the academic and evangelical study of the Old Testament. The journal seeks to fill a need in academia by providing a venue for high-level scholarship on the Old Testament from an evangelical standpoint. The journal is not affiliated with any particular academic institution, and with an international editorial board, online format, and multi-language submissions, JESOT cultivates and promotes Old Testament scholarship in the evangelical global community. The journal differs from many evangelical journals in that it seeks to publish current academic research in the areas of ancient Near Eastern backgrounds, Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinics, Linguistics, Septuagint, Research Methodology, Literary Analysis, Exegesis, Text Criticism, and Theology as they pertain only to the Old Testament. The journal will be freely available to the scholarly community and will be published bi-annually online. Hard copies will be produced by request. JESOT also includes up-to-date book reviews on various academic studies of the Old Testament.

Indexing

JESOT is indexed in Old Testament Abstracts, Christian Periodical Index, The Ancient World Online, and Biblicalstudies.org.uk.

Doctrinal Position

The editorial staff and board of Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament endorses the following doctrinal statement which has been adapted from the internationally oriented Lausanne Covenant:
1. The belief in the one eternal God who exists in three persons as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and who creates and governs all things in accordance with his will.
2. The belief that the Old and New Testament Scriptures are divinely inspired, without error in all that they affirm, the only infallible rule of faith and practice, and able to accomplish God’s purpose of salvation.
3. The deity of Jesus Christ, his substitutionary death on the cross as the necessary means for the redemption of the world, and his bodily resurrection and return.
4. The work of the Holy Spirit in granting new life to the believer and bearing witness to the Truth through the study and proclamation of the Word of God.
* JESOT welcomes submissions from contributors that do not adhere to the above statements. However, the editorial staff and board will reserve the right to determine an article’s appropriateness for publication.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Ebla Digital Archives

http://virgo.unive.it/eblaonline/cgi-bin/home.cgi

From the home page:

The aim of the Ebla Digital Archives [ EbDA ] database is to provide a digital edition of the entire corpus of cuneiform texts belonging to the Ebla Royal Archives. Texts are reproduced in the same sequence as in the individual volumes of the series Archivi Reali di Ebla – Testi published by the “Italian Archaeological Mission to Siria” of the Sapienza University of Rome. Compared with the hard copy publication, the digital edition provides harmonized transliterations, corrections and numerous collations made over the years by the team of epigraphers who cooperate with the Mission.
The project is presented as a work in progress. The ARET volumes currently included in the database will be gradually followed by other volumes published in the past years. Additional texts or portions of texts that have appeared in other series, in monographs or in journals will be also included in the database. Any suggestion by interested users will be highly appreciated.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Bible and Critical Theory

http://bibleandcriticaltheory.org/index.php/bct/index

From the home page:

The Bible and Critical Theory is an exploratory and innovative online scholarly journal for biblical studies, published by the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar. The journal explores the intersections between critical theory, understood in the broad sense, and biblical studies. It publishes peer-reviewed articles that investigate the contributions from critical theory to biblical studies, and contributions from biblical studies to critical theory. The journal has an active series of book reviews, which are published as they are ready.
BCT content is available freely on an open access basis. It is also aggregated by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and is indexed by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Religion Database and Scopus.

Update:

2016

Vol 12, No 1 (2016): Jonah


Friday, November 23, 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Institute for Biblical Research's BBR

http://www.ibr-bbr.org/bulletin-biblical-research

IBR has just made open access its journal, Bulletin for Biblical Research, for the years 1991-2009. This learned institute is comprised of evangelical biblical scholars (as opposed to theologians), many of whom are first rate.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism

http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/index.html#page=home

From the home page:
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (ISSN 1089-7747) is a peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to study of the Jewish and Christian biblical texts. Details of the journal are provided on the About page while current and past issues are accessed through the Contents page.

Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/

The site has translations of various cuneiform texts as well as teaching resources, bibliography, and a dictionary on "people, gods & places."

Friday, October 12, 2012

The Gospel of Thomas Resource Center

http://gospel-thomas.net/

Among the website's offerings are videos, photographs, Unicode Coptic fonts, and an interlinear Coptic-English translation of the Gospel of Thomas

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

NETS electronic edition of the Septuagint

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/

The New English Translation of the Septuagint is an online English edition of the LXX is from the University of Pennsylvania. The chapters of the OT can be downloaded individually as PDFs. (It looks like the galley proofs from the 2007 Oxford publication.)

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/

From the homepage:
Numerous royally commissioned texts were composed between 744 BC and 669 BC, a period during which Assyria became the dominant power in southwestern Asia. Six hundred to six hundred and fifty such inscriptions are known today. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, under the direction of Professor Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania, will publish in print and online all of the known royal inscriptions that were composed during the reigns of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC), Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Sargon II (721-705 BC), Sennacherib (704-681 BC), and Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), rulers whose deeds were also recorded in the Bible and in some classical sources. The individual texts range from short one-line labels to lengthy, detailed inscriptions with over 500 lines (2500 words) of text.
Besides offering corpuses I and IV, the site has information on Neo-Assyrian history, bibliography, and so forth.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Project Muse journals relevant to the ANE

http://muse.jhu.edu/

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Did Jesus Have a Wife? -- The Coptic Gospel Papyrus

Several papers have recently broken the story of the discovery of a 4th century fragment of a Coptic Papyrus codex that raises the possibility that Jesus was married. For the New York Times piece, see

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www


Karen L. King, a professor of Early Church History at Harvard Divinity School has studied the papyrus and published a draft article on it (the final version was to be published in the Harvard Theological [HTR] Review 106/1 [2013], but Harvard has postponed it):

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-projects/the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife

Some of the significant points from King's article are:
  • that the fragment is too early to prove or disprove that Jesus was or was not married
  • it does attest to the dispute which began in the second century
  • the provenance of the fragment is unknown, and it is owned by a private (anonymous) collector
  • the fragment has been in private hands since at least 1982, when a professor Fecht (Berlin) is supposed to have remarked "is the only example of a text in which Jesus uses direct speech in reference to a wife" (das einzige Beispiel für einen Text ist, in dem Jesus die direkte Rede in Bezug auf eine Ehefrau benutzt).
  • by her own admission, King is "is neither a papyrologist nor a Coptic linguist," thus had to seek assistance for the translation from Roger Bagnall and AnneMarie Luijendijk of Princeton, who judged that the fragment is authentic and, based on paleography, dates ca. to the fourth century.
  • Three reviewers for HTR have differed on the authenticity of the fragment.
  • Although waiting for further testing (e.g. ink), King's review of the disputes led to the conclusion for authenticity.
  • In her summary, King states: "What can be said securely is that our fragment contains the first known statement that explicitly claims Jesus had wife. It consists of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples." She also reiterates that the late date of the fragment precludes it as evidence for the question of Jesus' marital status.
  • Translation:
1 ] “not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe…”
2 ] The disciples said to Jesus, “.[
3 ] deny. Mary is worthy of it      [or, Mary is n[ot] worthy of it]
4 ]……” Jesus said to them, “My wife . .[ [
5 ]… she will be able to be my disciple . . [
6 ] Let wicked people swell up … [
7] As for me, I dwell with her in order to . [
8] an image [
1 ] my moth[er
2 ] three [
3 ] … [
4 ] forth which … [
5 ] (illegible ink traces)
6 ] (illegible ink traces)

My Responses
  • King should be commended in that, thus far, she has generally operated with due caution and even-handedness.
  • Although line 4 of the fragment does appear to indicate that Jesus attests to having a wife, the line is fragmentary: while somewhat unlikely the possibility remains that the lacunae before and after what remains in line 4 might qualify or undermine the putative attestation.
  • As with other sensational finds (e.g., the Tel Dan stele, James ossuary), one must be very cautious about drawing conclusions about this fragment. Perhaps the greatest concern is its unknown provenance, which limits what one can say definitively about it.
  • King herself is duly cautious and excludes the possibility that the papyrus is probative for the issue of Jesus' marital status.
  • There is disagreement between scholars over the authenticity of the fragment.
  • Very few scholars to date have had access to the papyrus (although King states her willingness to make it available).
  • Establishing the date of such artifacts on paleographical grounds is not easy--even for distinguished epigraphers (e.g., André Lemaire on the James ossuary).
  • Generally, the significance of such material is debated for years by scholars before a consensus arises.
  • The first several centuries after Jesus produced many texts about him (as King notes) which were not regarded as canonical (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas).
What if Jesus did have a wife?
If it were ultimately demonstrated that Jesus did have a wife, then he would have lived the "default" mode of existence for a Second Temple period Jew. That is, the cultural expectation was for a man to take a wife. The NT spends little time addressing spouses, but at least some of the disciples--including Peter--were evidently married (1 Cor 9:5). Presumably Jesus would have enjoyed sexual relations with his wife, which, again would have been the norm and which would not undermine texts such as Heb 4:15 nor any Christian doctrine. If children had been produced by such union, then we would have pause for ontological thought; but at this point we are well into the realm of speculation.

Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew

http://www.sdbh.org/

This is a valuable project that is in the making.

From the website:
The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (henceforth SDBH) project is carried out under the auspices of the United Bible Societies. It was launched in the year 2000. Its aim is to build a new dictionary of biblical Hebrew that is based on semantic domains, comparable to Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, which was first published in 1989.
     Preliminary research for this project was carried out by Reinier de Blois which resulted in a dissertation, titled Towards a New Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew Based on Semantic Domains, from which much of the contents of this document has been derived (de Blois 2000). In addition to this a computer tool called Vocabula was developed, that can assist the Hebrew lexicographer in his/her effort to create such a dictionary.
Several Hebrew scholars from different parts of the world are contributing to this dictionary. The editor for this project is Dr. Reinier de Blois, assisted by Prof. Dr. Enio R. Mueller.
     Several sample entries have been published on the web and more will be published as soon as they become available. There is always room for improvement and therefore users are invited to send their comments to the editor. If you want to have a look at the entries that have been published so far click here

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Septuagint LXX Project

http://septuaginta.net/

From the homepage:

Septuaginta LXX Project aims to produce an online edition of the Septuagint with a comprehensive critical apparatus, and a new English translation. We seek to collate all extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint and make them available at this website.

Septuaginta’s Goals:

  1. A new critical text of the Septuagint that is as close as possible to the original text.
  2. A comprehensive critical apparatus.
  3. A new English translation for the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.
  4. A PDF version of the Septuagint that will be made available for download.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

http://csntm.org/

The mission statement from the website says it all:
The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM), under the umbrella of The Center for the Research of Early Christian Documents (CRECD), exists for the following purposes:
  1. To make digital photographs of extant Greek New Testament manuscripts so that such images can be preserved, duplicated without deterioration, and accessed by scholars doing textual research.
  2. To utilize developing technologies (OCR, MSI, etc.) to read these manuscripts and create exhaustive collations.
  3. To analyze individual scribal habits in order to better predict scribal tendencies in any given textual problem.
  4. To publish on various facets of New Testament textual criticism
  5. To develop electronic tools for the examination and analysis of New Testament manuscripts.
  6. To cooperate with other institutes in the great and noble task of determining the wording of the autographa of the New Testament.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Lexicity

http://www.lexicity.com/

This website is an aggregator for web-based resources for the following languages:
Akkadian, Aramaic, Coptic, Egyptian, Hebrew, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Old English, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Syriac, and Ugaritic.

From the web site:
Learning an ancient language is difficult, but it becomes more difficult if one isn't part of a high school or college class or doesn't have access to the more advanced resources of a university library. The natural solution is the internet, where some of those advanced resources are housed and where there is an abundance of materials intended to facilitate one's study.

However, there are a few problems when turning to the internet. First, if one is a novice in a language, it can be difficult to discern between resources that are actually useful and that are just filler. This problem is compounded when one has never learned an ancient language of any kind, as is often the case when students begin to study Latin or Greek.

Another problem is that the resources can be very difficult to find. While contemporary dictionary and lexical projects are usually very accessible, there are other ancient language resources which are buried in the depths of Google searches, having been created long ago for an audience which has since moved on. If the resources can't be found, they as good as non-existent for frustrated students.

The solution to these problems is to unite all the resources under a single banner after reviewing them to see which are most useful. Lexicity has done this for 16 of the most prominent ancient languages. All the ancient language resources we feature are free and available to anyone; they're easy to navigate, easy to sort, and easy to access. You don't need to be an expert or be willing to wade through 50 pages of search engine results - just visit our languages page to get started.

So get started. Visit the language of your choice and get a grammar. Take advantage of extra resources like verb and noun charts, and look up anything you don't understand in the dictionaries. Visit the forum, chat with our toolbar at the bottom, and tell your friends. Many people have always wanted to give an ancient language a try; as Lexicity has shown, there won't ever be a better time.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Online resources for Peshitta (Syriac)

http://plgo.org/?p=1966

Patrologia Latina, Graeca et Orientalis has added a page for Syriac resources. These resources include the OT and NT and parts of both.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Princeton's Index of Christian Art

http://ica.princeton.edu/

From the home page:

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the Index of Christian Art web site. Little did the founder of the Index, Charles Rufus Morey, realize in 1917 how this resource would develop to be the most important archive of medieval art in existence and the most specialized resource for the iconographer. The Index has developed a life of its own over the last ninety years which has extended beyond the confines of its home in Princeton and is destined to have an even greater impact with the development of an electronic resource such as this. Despite the initial belief that all medieval art could be iconographically analyzed within fifteen years of the start of the project, it is a task which is not only still ongoing, but one which is thriving and ensures a prosperous future for the archive.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Codepoints: An Encyclopedia of Unicode Characters

http://codepoints.net/

From the home page:
Codepoints.net is dedicated to all the characters, that are defined in the Unicode Standard. Theoretically, these should be all characters ever used. In practice Unicode has 110181 codepoints defined at the moment, mapping characters from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Dingbats and Symbols
All codepoints are arranged in 16 so-called planes. These planes are further divided into several blocks with Basic Latin being the first one. You can browse one by one by starting with the first codepoint, 0000 or search for a specific character. If you’re not fully sure, try “Find My Codepoint”, to narrow down the candidates. Or maybe you are more daring and want a random codepoint?

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

An open-access resource for the inductive method

http://www.inductivebiblicalstudy.com/

In many seminaries, "sophisticated" methods and/or those of our Zeitgeist (e.g., advocacy criticism) displace any attention from what is known as the inductive method. The inductive method is, however, arguably the most profitable approach for teaching, preaching, and transformation. Moreover, it incorporates older and newer methods so that it is comprehensive. The above blog is a resource for those interested in learning more about the inductive method. It has, for example, a downloadable eight-part "how to" series and downloadable samples from Jonah and Mark.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

eTopoi. Journal for Ancient Studies

http://journal.topoi.org/index.php/etopoi/index

Information about this open access journal from its home page:
eTopoi is a bilingual magazine which is published by the Excellence Cluster Topoi. It is an open access periodical, and all articles are available as PDF documents free of charge. eTopoi provides a forum of exchange between all disciplines in the area of classical and ancient studies, from pre- and early history to Egyptology and Near Eastern studies, to classical archaeology, classical philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, theories of science, and theology, and extending to other disciplines as well.
Envisioned for inclusion in particular are articles dealing with the shaping and transformation of spatial structures and knowledge systems in ancient societies, as well as with perceptions of and reflections on these phenomena. The focus is on innovative forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, including geoscientific-archaeological projects and ones in computational archaeology, in the history of knowledge, and in historical geography. The magazine hence mirrors the orientations of both research institutes, the disciplines they represent, and the networks of partner institutions with which they are affiliated. It is available as a platform to all interested researchers worldwide.
Sections:
  • Individual contributions from the above-named disciplines
  • Research Reports from projects of the Excellence Cluster Topoi
  • Publications from conferences organized by the Excellence Cluster Topoi
  • eTopoi Reviews: book features and reviews of literature dealing with spatial aspects of ancient societies
  • eTopoi Conference Reports: reports on conferences organized by the excellence cluster Topoi and other research institutes

Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/behemoth

Information from the home page of this open access journal:
BEHEMOTH - A Journal on Civilisation focuses on the general problem of fading and/or failing statecraft and the consequences resulting out of it. It aims to discuss notions of risk and order within societies where state institutions gradually lose or have already lost their integrative power. The journal is a forum for discussion of the approaches appropriate to analyze these new, contingent and sometimes even precarious regimes of (dis)order.

Open Access Monographs: Topoi: Berlin Studies of the Ancient World / Berliner Studien der Alten Welt

Open Access Monographs: Topoi: Berlin Studies of the Ancient World / Berliner Studien der Alten Welt
From the home page:
The series: Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World brings together contributions from all fields of classical studies, from pre- and early history and classical archeology to ancient philosophy, theory of science and theology. Monographs and volumes which present the research results of the Excellence Cluster Topoi form a major focus of the series. Additional topics are currently being planned.

The Excellence Cluster Topoi examines the formation and transformation of space and knowledge in ancient civilizations. Topoi is the joint responsibility of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Partner institutions are the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German Archeological Institute, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Furthermore Topoi is interlinked with several university institutes as well as other institutions. For further information see www.topoi.org.

Some of the monographs in this series are open access, e.g., Population Dynamics in Prehistory and Early History (http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/179228?rskey=yh1hoB&result=4&q=topoi), Babylon (http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/42407?rskey=yh1hoB&result=2&q=topoi), and

Militärsiedlungen und Territorialherrschaft in der Antike (http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/42816?rskey=yh1hoB&result=1&q=topoi)


Saturday, July 21, 2012

USC Digital Library - The West Bank and East Jerusalem Searchable Map

http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/wbarc/

From the home page:

This collection includes lists of archaeological sites that have been surveyed or excavated since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Since that time, the oversight of the antiquities of the area has devolved on two government bodies: the military administration's Staff Officer for Archaeology (SOA) in Judea and Samaria and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The IAA, which is responsible for East Jerusalem, is a civil branch of government and its records are open for inspection. Some of the records of the Staff Officer for Archaeology in Judea and Samaria are being accessed in full for the first time as a result of the joint Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group. This involved a team of Israeli and a team of Palestinian archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals working in concert to create new data resources that document the single, unitary archaeological landscape of the southern Levant, which is now bisected by the modern borders.

The Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Working Group sponsored and partly funded a research effort by Rafi Greenberg (Tel Aviv) and Adi Keinan (University College London) in order to gather details about each site in the West Bank excavated or surveyed between 1967 (updated periodically). These data include the site name(s), location on a GIS grid, description of the site's major components (e.g. olive oil press; ritual bath; sheikh's tomb; church, synagogue, village); details about the periods when the site was occupied (e.g. Neolithic, Byzantine [Christian]; Iron Age II; Ottoman); and information about the excavators or surveyors who gathered data about the site; and relevant publications/bibliography. This collection page provides access to a database, which is a work in progress. We look forward to additions to this database file in the future as additional data are provided by Israelis, Palestinians and others.
The data contained in this database is also available in a visually searchable Google Map interface.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Partially open access: Theological Studies

http://www.ts.mu.edu/
The US Jesuit journal Theological Studies is now partially available on an open access basis. Individuals may download articles that are older than five years.

Details from the website:
Theological Studies is a quarterly journal of theology, published under the auspices of the Jesuits in the USA. Located at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it is under the general editorship of David G. Schultenover, SJ, in concert with its editorial consultants. Its book review editor is R. Daniel Kendall, S.J., of the University of San Francisco.

 Founded and sponsored by the Society of Jesus in the United States of America, Theological Studies is a Catholic scholarly journal that serves the Church and its mission by promoting a deeper understanding of the Christian faith through the publication of research in theological disciples. Through refereed articles and reviews of noteworthy books, the journal aims to recover and to help make accessible the riches of the theological tradition, and to present significant developments in current theology. It is published quarterly in English for an international readership.

Theological Studies is now making past articles as well as book reviews available for individual download, after the item has been in print publication for five full years (e.g., those published in 2006 are available for download beginning in the year 2012). Some notes:
  • Visitors are welcome to make single copies of articles from Theological Studies. Those who want multiple copies (for classroom use, for example) must get the necessary permission from Copyright Clearance Center and pay the royalty fee. To do this click on the icon: Go to CCC website
  • If you download only a single copy of an article for personal use, we request a small user’s fee to cover administrative costs of putting our past content online. To make your contribution, please click the “Donate” button on the left-hand side of this page.
  • Visitors will experience the search features best when they have the latest version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome (all of which employ JavaScript and AJAX).
  • The articles have been rendered in Adobe Acrobat's text format, so that users can select and copy text from the PDF files (i.e., they have all been OCR'ed).

Go to download articles.

The search page provides a dynamic search feature that allows the visitor to find PDF versions of past articles by entering in an author's name, a title of a past article (or a partial title or keyword) or a volume number. Note: the search feature does not allow a search by year of appearance, but since TS has been in continual publication since 1940 (with its volume 1), the simple mathematical formula (Year of Publication) - 1939 = Volume number will allow the user to enter the correct volume number for the known year of publication (e.g., a year of publication in 2000, minus 1939, will result in the correct volume of 61).

Go to book reviews and shorter notices

Clicking on the PDF link for a given issue of the journal will take you to the reviews and notices for that issue. These you can then page through and/or search by typing word(s) into the search box on the menu bar in Adobe Acrobat (or your PDF reader, such as Preview on the Mac).

Access to the Most Recent Issues (for individual paid subscribers only)

If you are a current individual subscriber to Theological Studies you can access your currently subscribed issue and articles by following this link.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages

http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gr_elib.htm

From the home page:
The GRETIL e-libray is a collection of electronic editions of books and articles on Indological and related subjects. The focus is on older standard works, along with writings relevant to the history of indology and related fields (Wissenschaftsgeschichte).
 

Friday, June 29, 2012

Gerstenberger - collected essays

From the AGADE listserve comes more good news of open access publications from distinguished scholars:

Published electronically and free at online access is a large
collection of my essays in German and English written over more than
50 years.

The publisher is the University of Giessen, Germany. Editors are my
colleagues Ute E. Eisen and Christl M. Maier. The title of
this 700 page opus is: Erhard S. Gerstenberger: Die Hebraeische Bibel
als Buch der
Befreiung. Ausgewaehlte Aufsaetze, 2012. Here is the URL access:

               http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8601/

geb stands for "Giessener Elektronische Bibliothek". You can get to
the book also by way of
www.uni-giessen.de navigating through the university site.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Zeitschrift für die Alterthumswissenschaft (pre-1857)

http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/eb/2011/0283/
Zeitschrift für die Alterthumswissenschaft has several pre-1857 issues that are open access. Perhaps best for those doing reception history.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Princeton's Index of Christian Art

http://ica.princeton.edu/

From the home page:
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the Index of Christian Art web site. Little did the founder of the Index, Charles Rufus Morey, realize in 1917 how this resource would develop to be the most important archive of medieval art in existence and the most specialized resource for the iconographer. The Index has developed a life of its own over the last ninety years which has extended beyond the confines of its home in Princeton and is destined to have an even greater impact with the development of an electronic resource such as this. Despite the initial belief that all medieval art could be iconographically analyzed within fifteen years of the start of the project, it is a task which is not only still ongoing, but one which is thriving and ensures a prosperous future for the archive.
Thanks must go to the many scholars who have generously given of their knowledge and experience into making this resource what it is today and to the new group of users who continually give of their research.

Colum Hourihane
Director, Index of Christian Art
Princeton University

open access Loeb books from edonnelly.com

Friday, June 1, 2012

Bible Lands e-reviews

http://biblelandsreview.wordpress.com/description/

From the home page:
Bible Lands E-Review (BLER), the on-line journal of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, is a peer reviewed academic journal dedicated to presenting current research on the civilizations of the Bible and Ancient Israel, Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East and the Classical World.

The site also has the following links which may be of interest for readers of this blog: Bible Lands Lectures, Bible Lands Studies, Complete Studies and Lectures.

As a newly created journal, there are few articles, lectures, etc.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Dickinson College Commentaries: Greek and Latin

http://dcc.dickinson.edu/

From the home page:
Latin and Greek texts with explanatory notes, vocabulary, and graphic, video and audio elements, for readers of Greek and Latin. Submissions to the series are welcome.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Holy Land Photos

http://holylandphotos.org/

From the web site:

Purpose of HolyLandPhotos.org
The purpose of HolyLandPhotos.org is to make images from the lands of the Bible available free to the general public. Our emphasis is upon the images. The text accompanying the image is meant to be helpful in identifying what one is looking at in the image and to comment briefly about the significance of the image, but the text is not intended to be exhaustive. The interested person should pursue avenues of interest in relevant dictionaries and encyclopedias.
The site has been conceived, developed, and maintained on a volunteer basis by Dr. Carl Rasmussen and Jesse Gavin (see below). Carl Rasmussen provides all photos unless otherwise noted.
Please note — this is a GROWING site. Images are being added to it weekly.
Use of the Web Site
Classroom  — For those with classroom connections to the internet, you can merely log on to www.HolyLandPhotos.org and click away to show images to your class.  You are invited to include references/links to the web site in your syllabai and web pages that you maintain - so that your students can access the site for study purposes.
Bible Study  — HolyLandPhotos.org can be used by those studying the Bible. As you become interested in various places check HolyLandPhotos.org to see if images of the place or area that you are studying are available in the digital database. This can be done by checking the site list, using the search feature, or browsing by country and region.
Digital Presentations — The images in the HolyLandPhotos.org are not just for viewing, but are available for you to download and use in your digital presentations: in the classroom, in churches, in synagogues, in religious schools, etc. For downloading permission click here.
Current and Anticipated Coverage of HolyLandPhotos.org
The current coverage of this web site includes archaeological sites and views in Israel, Turkey, Greece, Jordan, and Lebanon. About 40-50 images are being added weekly.  You are invited to register here for occasional announcements on image additions.
The Images
The images in the database are JPEG format.  It has not been possible to be entirely consistent with image size or quality. We will be entering our best quality images, and will be upgrading images as better ones become available.  Look in the lower left portion of the page to click to download the best available version of an image.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The OsirisNet Project

http://www.osirisnet.net/e_centra.htm

This website showcases the tombs and mastabas of ancient Egypt, showing digital photos of burial chambers and tomb floor plans.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Writings by Emmanuel Tov

http://www.emanueltov.info/publications.html

Emmanuel Tov has a web site with links to scores of his publications. Some are to book sellers, but many are for free PDF downloads, including books, papers, and reviews. On offer:
  • Tov, Emmanuel, ed. The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint.   VTSup 72. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
  • Tov, Emmanuel. Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 54. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
  • Tov, Emmanuel, ed. Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible and Qumran: Collected Essays.   Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 121. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.
It appears as though not all of the essays are in every volume (and many are in galley proof form), but there's plenty to keep you reading for a long time.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Directory of Open Access Books

http://www.doabooks.org/

This aggregator includes 756 academic, multi-disciplinary, peer-reviewed books from 22 publishers.

The site has basic and advanced search capacities. Books are not downloadable (at least the one that I was interested in was not), but, unlike Google Books, the entire text is accessible online. When a book that is searched for is found, the left margin of the page has links for the book in libraries and book sellers (print and, when available e-book versions).

The site also publishes a newsletter.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Harley and Woodward's History of Cartography Online

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html

From the home page:
The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right column) are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.

On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first two volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of all the PDFs that make up the first four books.
The PDFs appear to be of individual chapters of the volumes rather than the entire volumes in one go.

Ancient Near East Monographs series

http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/Books_ANEmonographs.aspx

SBL's Ancient Near East Monographs is now open access. From the home page:

The focus of this ambitious series is on the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel and its literature, from the early Neolithic to the early Hellenistic eras. Studies that are heavily philological or archaeological are both suited to this series, and can take full advantage of the hypertext capabilities of “born digital” publication. Multiple author and edited volumes as well as monographs are accepted. Proposals and manuscripts may be submitted in either English or Spanish. Manuscripts are peer reviewed by at least two scholars in the area before acceptance. Published volumes will be held to the high scholarly standards of the SBL and the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente. The partnership between the SBL and the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente was initiated under the auspices of SBL’s International Cooperation Initiative (ICI) and represents the type of international scholarly exchange that is the goal of ICI.
Published Volumes:
 
Constructs of Prophecy in the Former and Latter Prophets and Other Texts 
Edited by Lester L. Grabbe and Martti Nissinen
Download
Paperback
Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction 
Alan Lenzi
Download
Paperback
El Intercambio de Bienes entre Egipto y Asia Anterior: Desde el reinado de Tuthmosis III hasta el de Akhenaton 
Graciela Gestoso Singer
Download
Centro y periferia en el mundo antiguo: El Negev y sus interacciones con Egipto, Asiria, y el Levante en la Edad del Hierro (1200-586 a.C.)
Juan Manuel Tebes

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Google Art Project

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Google's tentacles are everywhere. Now they have encompassed some of the world's great art galleries, e.g., the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery, the Israel Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art. The high-res scans can be enlarged, and there is some capacity for sharing.

BYU's Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts

http://cpart.byu.edu/?page=1

This resource has a wealth of Syrian texts and some Coptic texts as well. Some are simply a catalog of the manuscripts rather than the actual texts.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Codex Bezae

High-resolution scans of this famous codex are now online via the University of Cambridge Digital Library:

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-NN-00002-00041/

From the home page:

There are half-a-dozen ancient manuscripts which are the foundation of our understanding of the text of the New Testament writings. Among these stands the copy known since the sixteenth century as Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis. Any manuscript which has survived from antiquity is a marvel for this reason alone, and as we explore its pages, we have a rare opportunity to explore a little of the written culture of late antique Christianity. Although in the past century some remarkable papyrus manuscripts have been recovered from the sands of Egypt, their discovery has in general served more to highlight the significance of the parchment manuscripts than to diminish it.

Among this group, Codex Bezae occupies a unique place for several reasons. In the first place, as a bilingual manuscript, with a Greek text and a Latin version on facing pages, it provides a valuable insight into the reception of the Gospels and Acts in the western Christian tradition. The Latin version it contains is one of the small handful of manuscripts which are the most important witnesses to the development of a Latin version before Jerome's famous Vulgate of 382. Secondly, it provides a strikingly different form of text to that preserved in almost every other manuscript, and to the printed Greek text and the translations derived from it. These differences consist in the Gospels in frequent harmonisation of the text and in Acts in a free restyling of the text found best represented by Codex Vaticanus and reproduced in English translations.

The manuscript is the work of a single scribe, one trained primarily to copy Latin texts. Its present contents are the Gospels of Matthew, John, Luke and Mark, a single page of the last verses of 3 John (in Latin only) and the Acts of the Apostles. The only book that is complete is the Gospel of Luke, since there are pages missing from all the others. It is possible that between Mark and 3 John the manuscript originally contained Revelation and the rest of the Epistles of John. The Gospels are in the so-called Western order, with the two who were apostles first, followed by the two who were companions of the apostles.

The manuscript is best dated to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. Many places have been proposed for its place of origin, including southern France, Africa, Egypt and Palestine. I have proposed Berytus (Beirut). There were a number of correctors and annotators working in the first centuries of its existence. The first strong evidence for the manuscript's history is replacement leaves for missing portions of Matthew, John and Mark. The style of writing and the use of blue ink provide a very strong case that these pages were written in Lyons in the ninth century. At this period Lyons was an important centre for the dissemination of ancient works in the west.

It is probable that the Codex Bezae remained there, in the Monastery of St Irenaeus, until the sixteenth century. It was apparently taken over the Alps to the Council of Trent in 1546. Its textual significance was already recognised, since it was one of the manuscripts whose readings was cited in the first edition of the Greek New Testament to include such information, made by Robert Stephanus in Paris in 1550. Then after the sacking of Lyons in the religious wars it came into the hands of the Reformer Theodore de Bèze, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. The first part of its name is derived from the Latin form of his name, Beza. In 1581, Bezae presented the manuscript to Cambridge University. This is the origin of the second part of its name, Cantabrigiensis.

A printed transcription of the manuscript (using a font imitating the shape of the characters) was published by the University Press in 1793. A more accurate transcription, with the corrections and annotations fully detailed, was made by F.H. Scrivener and published by Deighton Bell in 1864. A facsimile edition was published by the University Press in 1899.

Of the many distinctive readings of the manuscript, the following deserve special mention:

It is the oldest manuscript to contain the story of the adulterous woman (John 7.53-8.11). It is on Folios 133v to 135.

The genealogy of Jesus in Luke's Gospel is arranged in reverse order so as to conform more closely with that in Matthew. It is on Folios 195v to 197.

There is a story about Jesus found in no other manuscript (the story of the man working on the Sabbath, placed after Luke 6.4). It is on Folios 205v and 206.

It is the oldest manuscript to contain the longer ending of Mark (16.9-20). The last pages of Mark are missing, so all that remains is the Greek text of verses 9-15. What follows is text supplied in the ninth century. It is on Folio 347v.

In Acts, when the angel delivers Peter from prison the detail is added that they go into the street down seven steps (Acts 12.10). It is on Folios 463v-464, eleven lines from the bottom of the page.

Professor David Parker
Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology and Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
University of Birmingham
March, 2012


Editions:

The Melammu Project

The Melammu Project has a digital library that provides pdf copies of many publications of Assyrian and Babylonian interest:

http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/bibliography/bibllib.php

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Theological Commons

Princeton Seminary has digitized many (mostly older) books on theology and religion, with categories including Protestant and Catholic works, History, NT, Philosophy, Mission, and Language and Literature. The volumes range from pre-1800 to the present day, and include most European languages.

http://commons.ptsem.edu/

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Old Maps Online

Old Maps Online is sort of a cartographile's equivalent of a rare book shop. It has ancient maps of place, plants, animals, etc.

http://www.oldmapsonline.org/#bbox=-110.001954,-51.984594,119.919921,71.999513&q=&datefrom=1000&dateto=2010

Friday, March 2, 2012

The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha

 http://ocp.tyndale.ca/

This developing site has some 30 texts each with an introduction and critical text. Another tab has bibliography, authors, and keywords.

From the home page:

The mandate of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the "Old Testament" Pseudepigrapha and related literature. Note that in a few cases it has not yet been feasible to publish the best eclectic text of a given document. In other cases the OCP edition of a document does not yet include all of the textual evidence. Readers should consult the "text status" information on the introductory page for each document to determine whether a better or more complete text exists elsewhere.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Ancient History Encyclopedia

http://www.ancient.eu.com/

From the home page:
Ancient History Encyclopedia is a non-profit community website that uses definitions, timelines, maps, illustrations, and articles to present ancient history in a very accessible way. The aim of this site is to promote ancient history, and to make it freely accessible for everybody. The website is built by the ancient history community, and every item is reviewed for quality.
So it's somewhat akin to Wikipedia, but probably more reliable.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Historical Photographs of the Land of Israel

Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library of the University of Haifa has made available online a number of historical photographs of Israel:

http://lib.haifa.ac.il/collections/isratage/index.php/en/

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

For Classical readers: Ovid, Myth and (Literary) Exile

http://www.univ-ovidius.ro/litere/ovidius/ovid.htm

From the home page of this new, open access journal:

The general purpose of the journal Ovid, Myth and (Literary) Exile is to gather new scholarship and research on Ovid’s work and influence on world culture on the one hand, and on exile, whether literary or not, on the other. The journal addresses academics and graduate students, whose research interests are in the area, to approach Ovid’s work as well as the concepts of exile and myth from large cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary paradigms including world literature, history, anthropology, sociology, the history of ideas, geography, politics and other associated fields and disciplines.

Old Testament Essays

http://content.ajarchive.org/cdm4/index_10109919.php?CISOROOT=/10109919

From the home page of this newly open access resource:


Welcome to Old Testament Essays
23 issues (In process)

Old Testament Essays (New Series) is the academic journal of the Old Testament Society of Southern Africa (OTSSA) published since 1987. Its precursors were the individual proceedings that the OTSSA published after its meetings from 1959-1986 and the journal Old Testament Essays that was published by the Department of Old Testament at Unisa from 1983-1987. Currently it operates with a local editorial and international advisory board. The journal disseminates the results of theological research regarding any aspect of the Old Testament of interest to both national and international scholars. It has a wide scope including various disciplines that are helpful in researching the Old Testament.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Patrologia Latina, Graeca et orientalis

Patrologia makes available online a number of  resources, including Latin and Greek texts:

http://bibliotheca.plgo.org/index.html

Friday, January 27, 2012

Now partial open access: Tyndale Bulletin

The Tyndale Bulletin is publication of Tyndale House, and independent, evangelical library in Cambridge, UK:

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/index.php?page=tyndale-bulletin

The Bulletin is open access from volume 1 to 2009.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Soncino Babylonian Talmud translation online

For an online translation of the Babylonian Talmud, go to:
http://www.halakhah.com/indexrst.html
which has links to the various books and tractates