Kristin De Troyer - Böcker

This volume brings together a lively set of papers from the first session of the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in 2016. Together with a few later contributions, these essays explore a number of thematic and textual issues as they trace the reception history of the Book of Isaiah in Deuterocanonical and cognate literature.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 2017 meeting of the SBL Program Unit on Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature in Boston, MA. The theme of the sessions was the interpretation of Torah in deuterocanonical literature. The contributions cover a variety of concepts and themes related to Torah and trace these through the Hebrew Bible, into the Septuagintal deuterocanonical books and other relevant and cognate literature.

In the history of the Greek translation of the Bible, there are two recensions that play a very important role. The first is the Hexaplaric recension of Origen. In this work, Origen displayed the different versions of the Biblical text and aimed at bringing the Greek text as it had been submitted so far closer to the then current Hebrew text. His intervention in the Greek text has "opened the gates to a flood of approximations of the Greek text to the Hebrew" (dixit Anneli Aejmelaeus). Indeed, one can find Hexaplaric readings in many manuscripts, and even in texts, manuscripts and versions that have never been labeled like that. Filtering out what are Hexaplaric readings is of utmost importance to the reconstruction of the Old Greek text, which may then point to another Hebrew text. A similar enterprise was undertaken by Lucian, and his work too needs to be reconstructed and traced in order to establish the Old Greek text. The current volume deals with the books of 1-2 Sam, 1-2 Kings, as well as Joshua and Esther.

Until recently, most non-biblical manuscripts attested in the Qumran library were regarded as copies of texts that were composed after the books of the Hebrew Bible were written. Students of the Hebrew Bible found the Dead Sea Scrolls therefore mostly of interest for the textual and interpretative histories of these books. The present collection confirms the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for both areas, by showing that they have revolutionized our understanding of how the text of the biblical books developed and how they were interpreted. Beyond the textual and interpretative histories, though, many texts attested in the Qumran library illuminate the time in which the later books of the Hebrew Bible were composed and reworked as well as Jewish life and law in the time when the canon of the Hebrew Bible developed. This volume gives important examples as to how the early texts attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls help to better understand individual biblical books and as to how the later texts among them illustrate Jewish life and law when the canon of the Hebrew Bible evolved. In order to find an adequate expertise for the seminar "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hebrew Bible", the editors invited both junior and senior specialists in the fields of Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinics to Rome.

The biblical Dead Sea Scrolls are about a thousand years older than the earliest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and provide crucial insights into the history of the biblical texts. The Biblia Qumranica is the first comparative edition of these unique textual witnesses. The present volume provides a synopsis of the Minor Prophets manuscripts from Qumran and the other sites at the Dead Sea. In addition the Masoretic text (according to Codex Leningradiensis) and the Septuagint (according to the Göttingen edition) are included as reference texts. The Biblia Qumranica is a unique tool for text-critical analysis which allows for the first time to analyse and interpret the textual witnesses of the Hebrew Bible as preserved from the Second Temple period in comparison to each other.