Bible Review

Birger A. Pearson, “The New Alexandria Library: An Update,” Biblical Archaeologist 56:4 (1993), p. 221.

Tell Mardikh (ancient Ebla) is about 35 miles southwest of Aleppo. In the years following its discovery in 1964, over 16,000 tablets and fragments, dating to the latter half of the third millennium B.C.E., were excavated. These texts are written in either Sumerian or the local Semitic language called Eblaite. See Alan Millard, “Ebla and the Bible—What’s Left (If Anything)?” BR 08:02.

See Philip J. King, “Jeremiah’s Polemic Against Idols—What Archaeology Can Teach Us,” BR 10:06.

The Greek phrase is variously translated as “prince of demons” (RSV, NAB), “ruler of the demons” (NRSV), “prince of devils” (REB) and “chief of the devils” (NJB).

The best-known book collected from a non-Greek culture and translated into Greek at the library was the Hebrew Bible, known in its Greek form as the Septuagint (LXX). It seems to have reached the state of a largely completed and official Greek text between 150 and 50 B.C.E. Philo Judaeus (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.) obviously knew and worked with a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.

In this column we resume the discussion begun previously in “Reading an Ancient Book in a Modern World,” BR 12:05.

See Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Tanach and New Testament,” in Biblical Studies: Meeting Ground of Jews and Christians, ed. Lawrence Boadt, Helga Croner and Leon Klenicki, Studies in Judaism and Christianity/Stimulus, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980).

For a full description of these debates, see Jane Dillenberger and John Dillenberger, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling—To Clean or Not to Clean,” BR 04:04.

For a description and plan of the ceiling and its parts, see Suzanne F. Singer, “Understanding the Sistine Chapel and Its Paintings,” BR 04:04.