Biblical Studies Carnival # 217 – April 2024

Summer is almost upon us. Here in Louisiana, that means hot, humid weather in which my electric bill climbs as swiftly as a rocket to the moon. What we need, then, is a carnival, and I’ve got one for you! It covers (some of the) material I’ve consumed during the month of April. If you feel like I’ve missed something, don’t complain. Host a carnival yourself! Just contact Phil Long, the Biblical Studies Carnival ringleader and he can get you signed up to host. You can reach Dr. Long by email (plong42@gmail.com) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Plong42).

Hebrew Bible & Related

• Over at thetorah.com, Hartley Koschitzky talks about the tragic story of Nadab and Abihu from Leviticus 10. In the piece, he argues that the sin of these two priests was in their doing in secret what the deity had wanted done publicly, namely sacrificing.
  
• Phil Long reviewed Lexham Geographical Commentary on the Pentateuch, a volume that came out in 2022. Though brief, Long’s review has whet my appetite and I think I may need to add this and other volumes in that series to my bookshelf.
  
• How did Cyrus the Great, referred to as God’s anointed by Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 45:1), meet his end? That’s the subject of an article by Morteza Arabzadeh Sarbanan written for ANE Today. In it, Sarbanan looks at the relevant evidence found in ancient historical sources like Herodotus and Xenophon. So, how did Cyrus die? Check out the article!
  
• Classicist Peter Gainsford queries whether the book of Daniel was influenced by Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet from around the 7th century BCE. While he admits that it’s a big “if,” the post is nevertheless interesting as it shows how scholars can tease out potential influences and sources for ancient texts.
  
• What exactly is going on with “yellow” hair in Leviticus 13 and what does it have to do with skin diseases? That’s the subject of Phil Lieberman’s article “Is Yellow a Biblical Color?” He looks at the ways the Hebrew term tzahov was rendered in other ancient translations to figure out what the term may have meant in its original context. (This was a really interesting read.)
  
• Over at my website, I wrote a brief review of Christopher Golden’s horror novel Ararat. The story asks the question, What if the story of Noah was based in truth but it was far more unsettling than anyone knew?
  
• How best to translate Isaiah 3:12? Henry Neufield has thoughts. The moral of the story: all translation is interpretation and entails the loss of something from the source language to the translation.
  
• If you’re looking for a free book, Chuck Jones over at The Ancient World Online linked to Katherine Southwood’s Job’s Body and the Dramatised Comedy of Moralising. Download it today!
  
• Where do babies come from? Most parents have probably gotten that question from their inquisitive kids at some moment or another. What does the Bible say about it? That’s the question taken up by Marianne Grohmann in a post entitled “Biblically, How Are Babies Conceived?”
  
• Spencer McDaniel wrote about whether Non-Israelite cultures had their own “Bibles.” In short, many cultures have their own sacred texts but it was less common than you might think.
  
• Drs. Joshua Bowen and Kipp Davis address common apologetic arguments to justify slavery in the Bible, particularly those proffered by Gavin Ortlund.

• Ethan Schwartz reviewed the volume Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel’s Prophetic Library by Nathan Mastnjak. The review highlights many interesting aspects of Mastnjak’s work, the most intriguing (to me) the idea that the book of Isaiah, taken by scholars to be a composite text, is in reality an anthology of material taken from many different prophets. I’m adding this one to my wishlist!
  
• David Roos and Dr. Helen Bond talked with Carol Meyers about the biblical Exodus on their podcast Biblical Time Machine. Meyers, as you may know, wrote a commentary on Exodus for the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series.
  
• Sara Parks’s article “The Greek Hat: 2 Maccabees 4:12 as a Euphemism for Reverse Circumcision” is available to download for free! (My favorite price!)
  
• Aren Maeir posted to his blog an interview he did for the podcast Reaching Into Plato’s Cave on the origins of Judaism, the Exodus, and more. The interview happened a couple of years back.
  
• Over at his YouTube channel Tablets and Temples, Lachlan Davis talks about the story of Judah and Tamar and its relationship to political realities in ancient Israel.

New Testament & Related

• David Brakke joins Shirley Paulson to talk about the texts that early Christ followers read. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the “New Testament.”

• If you’re interested in reading Greek manuscripts, Clark Bates has you covered! In a post for textandcanon.org, Bates talks shop on a level even an amateur like myself can understand!
  
• Candida Moss’s book God’s Ghostwriters is out and there are a number of reviews of it. Tim Whitmarsh offers us his thoughts on the volume, referring to it as “a brilliant and subtle detective story.” Brent Nongbri reviewed it too, writing that “if the field takes God’s Ghostwriters seriously (and it should), then there is no going back.” Additionally, Dr. Moss appeared on the aforementioned Biblical Time Machine to talk about the relationship of slavery and the creation of the Bible. And finally, Moss was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Congrats!
  
• Micheal Kok shares a list of surveys on the reception of the Gospel of Mark. Kok wrote on this subject in his 2015 volume The Gospel on the Margins, a volume that I think is an excellent introduction to the subject of Mark’s reception.
  
• Was the transmission of the stories that make up the Gospels like the telephone game? John Nelson briefly explores that issue over at his website Behind the Gospels.
  
• Stephen Carlson, an associate professor at Australian Catholic University, was interviewed on the subject of Bible translations and their trustworthiness.

• Heather Thiessen offers some reflections on Luke 7:1-10, particularly how it relates to faith. She writes, [T]his story really has me thinking about where our ‘models of reality’ come from…. And how those models influence what we think can happen in the world, maybe limiting it, or maybe allowing it.”
  
• Was the darkness that covered the land when Jesus died an eclipse? Mark Hoffman takes up that question, alluding to his dissertation, especially as it pertains to language used in the Gospel of Luke.
  
• Proving true the adage “a stopped clock is right twice a day,” an article over at Crossway entitled “10 Things You Should Know about the Book of Mark” is surprisingly helpful. The piece, written by Douglas O’Donnell, even agrees with the consensus of modern scholarship that the Gospel of Mark was not only written prior to the other Synoptics but that those later narratives used Mark’s to write their own.
  
• Should you read the Greek New Testament? Yes, says J. David Stark. (This only works well if you know Greek. Otherwise, stick to your English Bible.)
  
• Over at the blog Spoiled Milks, Spencer Robinson uses as a launching pad the entry on “hardness of heart” from the second edition of the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Robinson manages to pack quite a bit into this brief post and I like how he uses the entry as fodder for an insightful post.
  
• It may not be Christmas, but it’s always a good time to think about the nativity! Author Paul Clark wonders just how reliable the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth are.
  
• Tamás Visi looks at the crucifixion of Jesus, asking whether the blame can be laid at the feet of the Jews. Among other things, Visi highlights a logical inconsistency in the story of Jesus’s death.
  
• New book alert: The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate. It will arrive in August!
  
• If you need a bibliography of English works on Paul within Judaism and Romans, Ross Neir has what you need!
  
• Andrew Mark Henry of the Religion for Breakfast YouTube channel interviewed Bart Ehrman on the formation of the New Testament canon. Ehrman was a student of Bruce Metzger who, of course, wrote the book on the New Testament canon.

• New book alert: Matthew Novenson’s Paul and Judaism at the End of History comes out this September!
  
• Dr. Nicholas Elder was interviewed on the podcast The Two Cities about his recent book Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions (Eerdmans, 2024). I’m currently half-way through Gospel Media and it’s just amazing.
  
• Blogger καταπέτασμα looks at the way in which the author of Acts “rescues” Paul’s legacy during “a crisis of interpretation that arose as a result of the emergence of a circular literary unit ascribed to the Apostle Paul.” This is part of a series he has been doing on the historical context in which the Gospels were written.