Monday, September 12, 2011

Talmud Blog: new books and web synopsis

NEW BOOKS are noted by Yitz Landes at the Talmud Blog:

Shaul Shaked, J.N. Ford, and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls Volume One (EIsenbrauns). The post has many useful links. Unfortunately, Eisenbrauns seems to have adjusted the URLs to both of the actual books and the links are dead at the moment. The page for this book is here.
The corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls from Sasanian Mesopotamia is perhaps the most important source we have for studying the everyday beliefs and practices of the Jewish, Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean, Zoroastrian and Pagan communities on the eve of the Islamic conquests. The bowls are from the Schøyen Collection, which has some 650 texts in different varieties of Aramaic: Jewish Aramaic, Mandaic and Syriac, and forms the largest collection of its kind anywhere in the world. This volume presents editions of sixty-three Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls, with accompanying introductions, translations, philological notes, photographs and indices. The themes covered include the magical divorce and the accounts of the wonder-working sages Hanina ben Dosa and Joshua bar Perahia. It is the first of a multi-volume project that aims to publish the entire Schøyen Collection of Aramaic incantation bowls.


Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd ed., Eisenbrauns). Again, the post has some good links. The link to the Eisenbrauns page is here.
Since its initial publication, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible has established itself as the indispensable authoritative textbook and reference on the subject. In this thoroughly revised third edition, Emanuel Tov has incorporated the insights of the last ten years of scholarship, including new perspectives on the biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which have now been published. Here are expanded discussions of the contribution of textual criticism to biblical exegesis and of the role of scribes in the transmission of the text. The introduction and references throughout the book have been thoroughly revised with the beginning student of textual criticism in mind.
Yitz Landes has also posted news of a new synopsis of Midrash Qohelet Rabbah.