Helpful Resources from Around the Web
Article from Science Daily: Fascinating article on research conducted on the Essene community’s latrine! It shows how the extreme purification of the Essenes negatively impacted their health in this unusual and inhospitable environment.
Read article here:
Biblical Latrine: Ancient Parasites Show That Cleanliness May Have Been Next To Sickliness
Interested in ancient manuscripts and/or the early evidence for Christianity? The movie Fragments of Truth premiered in a one night movie event on April 24 exploring the connections between the material evidence for the New Testament and the history it records. Follow the link for the trailer:
Interested in seminary training but don't want to move? Willing to take online courses, but interested in only high quality teaching? If your answer to both of these is yes, and you're OK without the diploma, you can get a complete high quality online education for free (although we can't vouch for each one, several of the profs. featured are personal friends and for whom we have the highest regard). Here's how:
In my previous Fragment of the Month on Codex Leningrad (St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Firkovich MS. Hebrew I, B19a – or Евр. I B 19a), I showed how documentary sources from the Cairo Genizah can help to fill out the picture of its manufacture: illuminating our knowledge of its scribe and of the social and cultural background to this great codex’s production.
From Brill
To celebrate 25 years of Dead Sea Discoveries, 25 articles — one from every Volume — are made available in free access during 2018. Every two months 5 articles will be freely available. Find out more here.
Residential Caves At Qumran, Magen Broshi and Hanan Eshel
(Volume 6, Number 3)
Angels at Sinai: Exegesis, Theology and Interpretive Authority,
Hindy Najman (Volume 7, Number 3)
Pliny on Essenes, Pliny on Jews, Robert A. Kraft
(Volume 8, Number 3)
Scholars, Soldiers, Craftsmen, Elites?: Analysis of French Collection of Human Remains from Qumran, Susan Guise Sheridan (Volume 9, Number 2)
From Literature to Scripture: Reflections on the Growth of a Text's Authoritativeness, Eugene Ulrich (Volume 10, Number 1)
Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The focus of this ambitious series is on the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel and its literature, from the early Neolithic to the early Hellenistic eras.
A recent announcement by the Library of Congress regarding the purchase of a single Torah scroll sheet dating from approximately 1000 C.E. has generated great interest in the topic of old Torah scrolls. Just what are the world’s oldest Torah scrolls and where does the Library of Congress scroll fit in?
