Just after I started my blog last April, Joel Ng hosted the first ever “Biblical Studies Carnival” at Ebla Logs. After that things went omniously silent at Ebla Logs… the last post was on April 7, 2005. Then in August 2005 Peter Kirby at Christian Origins blog announced the “Biblical Studies Carnival 2” and accepted submissions, but nothing ever materialized.

At any rate, I’m wondering what people think about establishing a regular “Biblical Studies Carnival”?

If you are wondering what a blog “carnival” is, first things first I should clarify that a “carnival” in the blogosphere has no clowns (well, at least literal clowns!) nor is it related to Mardi Gras. The way I would envision it, the Biblical Studies carnival would be a regular (once a month? every two weeks?) rotating carnival where one blogger sums up the best blog articles in the area of academic biblical studies in the given period of time. Blog articles may be submitted by their authors or be nominated by someone else. Then the host blogger would evaluate the submitted posts and write a post describing and interacting with the entries (with links). Some carnivals will group entries following different themes, while others go through the entries in order of submission (I personally find the ones that try to organize them around topics or themes more interesting).

In regards to the focus of the carnival, I would think the blog entries would have to be:

• Academic. Not that the posts have to be written by an academic, PhD, or professor, just that they represent an academic approach to the discipline rather than, for instance, a devotional approach.
• Broadly focused on discipline of biblical studies and cognate disciplines. I would envision this to include Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Christian Origins/New Testament, Intertestamental/Second Temple literature (e.g., LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc.), Patristics, among other things.

If you want to look at a couple examples of other carnivals, see the History Carnival XXI or Christian Carnival 100.

I would be happy to help organize it and perhaps do the first one to get it going again — unless , of course, there are other volunteers.

So what do you all think? If we could get a number of people committed for the next six months, then we could get it well established. Please either email me your thoughts or comment on this post.