Bible Review

Originally, Ezra and Nehemiah were considered one book entitled “Ezra.” They still appear as such in the Masorah and among the first medieval exegetes. The division into two is first reflected in the Greek Septuagint and in the Latin translations, although in the Septuagint’s Alexandrian version and the Peshitta the division is not yet found.

See “First ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries,” BAR 08:05, Raphael Levy, and the sidebar entitled “Genizah Collection at Cambridge University 2,000 Years of History.

The pseudepigrapha are a class of texts from the Greco-Roman period which take their name from the fact that many of them are spuriously attributed to biblical figures. This term is used in biblical studies to describe other texts from this period as well.

The apocrypha are those books which are part of the Hellenistic Jewish canon (represented by the Septuagint), but not part of the Palestinian canon (represented by the Masoretic text). Catholic Bibles include these books while Jewish and Protestant texts do not. These works date from the Greco-Roman period and were composed in Hebrew or Greek.

Lowth, De sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, prae-lectiones academicae Oxonii habitae (1753); Herder, Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie. Eine Anleitung fur den Liebhaber derselben und der altesten Geschichte des menschlichen Geistes (1782–1783).

See, for example, the reference to the scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” in the beautiful story of the Walk to Emmaus told by Luke (Luke 24:13–49).

Many of these letters are included in Shcharansky—Hero of Our Time, by Martin Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1986).

“Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History,” in Palestine in Transition, eds., David Noel Freedman and David F. Graf (Sheffield, England: Almond Press/American Schools of Oriental Research, 1983).

(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1979)

See “Mendenhall Disavows Paternity” in this issue.