I am quite excited about this new book on the Dead Sea Scrolls:
The Dead Sea Scrolls: What Have We Learned?, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006; Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com).
Dr. Eileen Schuller is Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a long-time member and former President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and one of the leaders in translating, editing, and publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. She has published a number of excellent works and was an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford University Press, 2000; Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com). Most importantly, Schuller is a careful, balanced, scholar.
The blurb from the publisher has this to say about the work:
Beginning with the question, What have we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls after 50 years of study, this book does not intend to present brand new discoveries, but rather presents a discovery made 50 years ago that everyone has heard at least something about already, and so takes the reader through the past 50 years decade by decade, highlighting key evenets and accomplishments in scrolls scholarship. The core chapters concentrate on a specific area where the scrolls have made a distinctive contribution in how we think about key questions in the development of early Judaism and early Christianity. In each chapter a few specific passages are discussed, so that the reader can become familiar with the actual text of the scrolls themselves.
The only thing I don’t get about the blurb is that it talks about the discovery made 50 years ago; the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 — doesn’t that make it almost 60 years ago?
Here is the table of contents for the book:
- Fifty Years Plus: A Survey Decade-by-Decade
- What Have We Learned About Scripture?
- What Have We Learned About Prayer and Worship?
- What Have We Learned About Women?
- Looking to the Future
This would be an excellent companion to one of the standard introductions to the Dead Sea Scrolls (See my “Annotated Guide to the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls” for more resources).
Oh, yeah, did I happen to mention that Eileen Schuller was my examiner for my doctoral comprehensive on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is on my dissertation committee?
Monday morning (29 May 2006) at the CSBS there was a special session entitled “Curses and Curse Stories in Antiquity / Les Malédictions dans l’Antiquité Ancienne.” This special two-year session is headed up by 
There is a new book on the Septuagint that focuses on the legends surrounding its origins (the Letter of Aristeas), as well as its reception history:
Morrow’s address was entitled, “Violence and Transcendence in the Development of Biblical Religion.” He began by noting the disappearance of individual lament/complaint prayer in the Second Temple period. The laments you do find in the Second Temple period differ from the earlier individual complaint psalms in that they tend to be in a narrative context, they neglect individual suffering, combine individual and communal elements, and have a unique status. According to Morrow, instead of individual lament psalms where the psalmist complains to God (and sees God as the problem in many cases), in the Second Temple period you see the development of prayers against demonic attack. The therapeutic impulse expressed in the earlier laments now shifts to incantations and psalm-like texts that have as their goal to expel demonic attack.
When I was in Toronto for CSBS, I went to the annual Pietersma picnic and caught up with the likes of Claude Cox, Tony Michael, Cameron Boyd-Taylor, Paul McLean, Wade White, and, of course, Al Pietersma. We talked briefly about a recent volume on the Septuagint in which Pietersma, Boyd-Taylor, and White contributed: