Cover, Philo of Alexandria, On the Change of Names (SBL/Brill)

NEW PAPERBACK FROM SBL PRESS:

Philo of Alexandria, On the Change of Names: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
Michael B. Cover

ISBN 9781628377972
Volume 8
Status Available
Publication Date February 2026

Paperback $95.00

In this eighth volume of the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series, originally published by Brill in hardcover, Michael B. Cover translates and provides commentary on Philo of Alexandria’s treatise On the Change of Names. Taking a cue from Platonist interpreters of Homer’s Odyssey, Philo reads the story of Abraham as an account of the soul’s progress and perfection. Responding to contemporary critics who mocked Genesis 17 as uninspired, Philo finds instead a hidden philosophical reflection on the ineffability of the transcendent God, the transformation of souls that recognize their mortal nothingness, the possibility of human faith enabled by the peerless faithfulness of God, and the fruit of moral perfection: the joy divine, prefigured in the birth of Isaac.

As the blurb says, this volume was published by Brill (in 2024), but it looks like I missed it then.

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Independence Day 2026

HAPPY 250TH INDEPENDENCE DAY TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

I can remember the Bicentennial celebrations. Wow.

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Knight-Messenger, The Place of Court Tales in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Literature (T&T Clark)

NEW BOOK FROM BLOOMSBURY/T&T CLARK:

The Place of Court Tales in the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish Literature

Form, Development, and Function

Andrew Knight-Messenger (Author)

Hardback
$120.00 $108.00

Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
$108.00 $86.40

Ebook (PDF)
$108.00 $86.40

Product details

Published May 14 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9781666980936 Imprint T&T Clark
Illustrations 12 tables
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series The Library of Second Temple Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

Description

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Jewish court tale, a genre that shaped Second Temple literature and theology. Andrew D. Knight-Messenger brings fresh insight to narratives featuring Jewish figures navigating foreign royal courts, from Daniel and Esther to lesser-known stories preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Far from being historical curiosities, these tales emerge as literary and theological responses to exile, exploring themes of divine sovereignty, identity, and restoration.

Knight-Messenger demonstrates how court tales challenge traditional views of exile as punishment, reframing it as a setting for divine action and renewal. His analysis uncovers links to apocalyptic motifs and the development of Jewish eschatology, situating these narratives within broader currents of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions.

Combining close literary reading with historical context, this volume traces the rise, evolution, and decline of the genre, offering comparative insights and revealing its enduring significance for understanding Jewish thought in the Second Temple period.

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Did Herod build a tomb in the Cave of Machpelah?

ARCHIVAL ARCHAEOLOGY: Herod built a secret tomb for himself inside the Cave of Machpelah, Israeli researchers reveal (Tamar Stein, Israel365 News).

The announcement came in a video interview posted to the C14 YouTube channel, featuring Chaim Shakolnik, district director of the COGAT Archaeology Unit, and Dr. Gershon Bar-Kochva, a researcher at Orot Israel College in Hebron. The two researchers said they came across previously unknown photographs — old images of sections of the underground system beneath the Machpelah structure — taken during the only scientific exploration of the caves to date, conducted in 1919. “We saw photographs that were not known until now,” Shakolnik said, “and we understood that they reveal part of the system that Herod planned and executed when he built this complex.”

The researchers drew on comparative architectual typology to conclude that the Machpelah structure is a burial complex. Reportedly, Carbon-14 tests have confirmed the Herodian date of the structure.

All very interesting, but let's see if it produces a peer-reviewed publication.

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Nora's western (Phoenician/Punic) necropolis reopens

PHOENICIAN AND PUNIC WATCH: Nora's western necropolis opens to the public after 90 years: "A historic day for the island, with centuries-old tombs discovered." Inside it are preserved fundamental testimonies for the reconstruction of the development of the ancient city (L'Unione Sarda.it).

An area previously inaccessible has been included in the Nora Archaeological Park 's visitor itineraries for the first time since 1936, or after 90 years, offering the public the opportunity to discover one of the most important Phoenician and Punic funerary contexts in the western Mediterranean.

[...]

I have said more about the Phoenicians at Nora, in Sardinia, here and links. The Phoenician Nora Stele inscription was also found at Nora, but in a secondary context, built into a later wall.

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Does the Bible prohibit intermarriage with non-Israelites?

DR. EVE LEVAVI FEINSTEIN: The Making of the Biblical Prohibition of Intermarriage (TheTorah.com).

Does the Bible prohibit intermarriage with non-Israelites? Not originally. Deuteronomy only prohibits intermarriage with the Canaanite nations. Faced with an intermarriage crisis in Persian Period Yehud, Ezra and Nehemiah reinterpret texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, thereby extending the prohibition of intermarriage to all the peoples of the land from their times.

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Turbo footnotes in the Victorian era

THE ANXIOUS BENCH: On Gnostics, Essenes, Footnotes, And The History Of Reading (Philip Jenkins).

I have been working on the discovery of alternative scriptures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, I have learned a lot more than I ever knew about ancient movements like the Gnostics, but some of my interesting “finds” have actually been about the era that was doing the discovery, and what we would consider the very different ways in which academics recorded and presented information. To put it simply, the Victorian scholarly book was a very different object from anything we might recognize today, and you might even need a user’s guide to get the best value out of any example that you might ever need for your research. Here is that guide. You’re welcome.

[...]

With marvelous examples from Lightfoot's commentary on Colossians and Philemon.

I wonder if in the Victorian era the pace of scholarship was slow enough that Lightfoot and his contemporaries just assumed scholars could read everything that was written. Or maybe they just wrote for themselves and it was their readers' problem to find what to take away.

Scholars do still produce turbo footnotes, if not as many as in the old days. But no one assumes that specialists read everything, and much current scholarship is scarcely read at all.

I think this AB post still counts, in a footnotey way, as a continuation of Professor Jenkins's Lost and Found Scriptues series. For earlier posts, see here and links.

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Did Joseph have a wife (wives?) before Mary?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The Question of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity. Considering the brothers and sisters of Jesus with Helen Bond (Lauren K. McCormick).

These two strands of evidence suggest a scenario where young Mary entered an existing household, perhaps helping to raise the eventual brothers and sisters of Jesus who were not her own biological kin, in a common circumstance of the ancient world. The Gospels plainly present Mary as a virgin at the time of Jesus’s conception, and centuries of later theology were built around the question of whether she remained a virgin perpetually. Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55–56 do not share that interest and instead focus on identifying the members of Jesus’s family.

This essay summarizes a BAR article by Helen Bond which is behind the subscription wall.

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The first complete French translation of the Talmud

TALMUD WATCH: The first complete French translation of the Talmud is complete. The complete translation project of the Talmud was launched at the residence of the President in the presence of President Herzog and businessman and philanthropist Patrick Drahi (i24News).

In a ceremony at the President's Residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Israel marked the completion and publication of the first full French translation of the Babylonian Talmud. The project is based on the landmark commentary of the late Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz and funded by the Patrick and Lina Drahi Foundation.

The date was not chosen by coincidence. The ceremony fell on the 9th of Tammuz, exactly 782 years after the Paris Disputation of 1242, which ended with King Louis IX ordering the burning of thousands of Talmud volumes and Jewish manuscripts in the city's public square. Marking the launch on that same date was a deliberate act of historical closure.

[...]

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More on the "Tracing Scribes and Scrolls" project

RESEARCH FUNDING: EU Funding Huge Project on the Origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written over centuries, and now fresh analysis may shed light on material origins. How does the Egyptian papyrus industry come into the story? (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

In short, the new analyses of papyrus, parchment and ink adding to the growing body of paleographic studies of handwriting, codicological analysis of the physical construction of the scrolls as well as linguistic and literary evidence will hopefully suss out the source of the material for the scrolls, and possibly unveil connections between remote centers of scribal activity.

I noted this project award a couple of days ago here. But this Haaretz article has lots of additional details.

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A new excavation at the Iron Age II eastern Ophel in Jerusalem

TEMPLE MOUNT (CORNER) WATCH: Why Excavate Area E on Jerusalem’s Ophel? The next opportunity to reveal Jerusalem’s royal quarter (BRENT NAGTEGAAL, Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology).

And it is here at the eastern Ophel, just 20 meters (66 feet) from the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, that an incredible opportunity for excavation has opened up—an opportunity that those of us at the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology are excited to take advantage of this summer under the direction of Hebrew University professor Yosef Garfinkel.

Why are we so excited for the opening of this new area, and what do we expect from the upcoming excavation? ...

Putting all the facts together, the archaeological opportunity of Area E to yield findings from Jerusalem’s royal quarter of biblical lore is unmatched. Area E is a potential archaeological gold mine—a gem, largely untouched and undisturbed. Yet while the expectation is to find high preservation from the First Temple Period, there are always archaeological surprises along the way, and all periods will be treated with equal archaeological care.

The chance to excavate Area E is not an opportunity that comes along very often. This is a location just inside the fortification line of Jerusalem’s royal quarter, where kings of the Bible once roamed, along with priests and prophets. As we have learned over the past 60 years of on-and-off excavation, the Ophel, the First Temple Period remains further up the hill—near the crest—did not endure the throes of Jerusalem’s cycle of destruction and rebuilding. It is only here, in the very eastern Ophel, that the royal quarter from King Solomon and every king thereafter can be viewed. No wonder Eilat Mazar was excited to excavate there.

For archaeology nerds, this article covers Area E and its context in great detail.

For many PaleoJudaica posts on the Hezekiah and Isaiah bullae, start here and follow the links. Posts on some of the other discoveries at the late Prof. Mazar's Ophel exavation are collected here. A more recent Ophel discovery is noted here.

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Gardner, The Letters of Mani (OUP)

BIBLOGRAPHIA IRANICA: The Letters of Mani. Notice of a New Book: Gardner, Iain. 2026. The Letters of Mani. A Lost Scripture of the Late Antique World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This is an important contribution, involving reassembling what's left of Mani's letters from fragmentary sources in many languages. Similar to our project of reconstructing the Book of Giants in MOTP2.

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A literal "hair of the dog" remedy from Ugarit?

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Nursing a Hangover in the Biblical World. A “hair of the dog” remedy from Ugarit (Lauren K. McCormick).

Remarkably, a Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) Ugaritic text (KTU 1.114) mentions dog hair in a medico-mythological context. The writing centers on a night of drinking at an ancient banquet called the mrzḥ. Does this coupling of dog hair and hangovers mean ancient people arrived at the same idea as many modern drinkers—that a hangover is best nursed with more alcohol?

The BHD essay has a link to the full underlying article by Silas Vermilya. Cross-file under Ugaritic Watch.

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The Hexapla Institute reloaded

THE ETC BLOG: The Hexapla Institute Relaunched (John Meade).

The Hexapla Institute was founded in 2001 to publish a “Field for the Twenty-First Century.” Over the past 25 years, the Institute has made certain but limited progress, publishing only one of its volumes (Job 22–42) during this time, even though several dissertations were completed on Genesis, Numbers, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Job. The progress has been slow due to the project’s lack of funding and editors who are already heavily committed to other academic projects (all routine challenges and difficulties for academic projects of this sort). Below is a brief update on what’s the same and what exciting new developments are on the horizon.

[...]

I noted the work of the Hexapla Institute here back in 2011. I'm glad to hear it is relaunching. It seems that its fate now rests with the IRS.

For more on Origen and his Hexapla, see the posts collected here.

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Fetching and stripping biblical texts?

THE OTTC BLOG: WebApp for Estimating Scroll Dimensions (Drew Longacre). Potentially useful for reconstructing fragmentary biblical scrolls and for other more recondite applications.

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Report on the "Christology Within Judaism" Enoch Seminar

RELIGION PROF: Christology Within Judaism (Enoch Seminar June 2026) (James F. McGrath).

Our focus at this meeting was on messianisms (including Christology) and “monotheism” (the scare quotes acknowledging the problematic nature of that term). I have used the phrase “Christology within Judaism” because on the one hand, it links to the wider efforts to situate Christian origins as a phenomenon within the Judaism of that time, and on the other hand it highlights the unhelpful historic tendency to study “Christology” (things said about Jesus) as something distinct and potentially separate from Jewish messianism in the same time period.

I was a member of the Early High Christology Club. I still have my mug.

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Chazon on the origin of fixed communal prayer

PROF. ESTHER CHAZON: The Origin of Fixed Communal Prayer: Evidence from Qumran (TheTorah.com).

The discoveries from the caves of Qumran yielded hundreds of psalms and prayers. Some of these derived from the sectarian community known as the Yaḥad, who lived there. Others came from diverse Jewish communities, and were preserved and presumably used by the Yaḥad as part of their twice-daily “offering of the lips” as an alternative to the “defiled” sacrifices being offered in the Temple. These documents offer invaluable evidence concerning the origin of fixed communal prayer in Judaism.

Some years ago I published a critical commentary on the liturgical texts from Qumran:

James R. Davila, Liturgical Works (Eerdmans Commentaries on the Dead Sea Scrolls; Eerdmans, 2001)

Also, congratulations to Professor Chazon on the Orion Center event tomorrow celebrating her recent Festschrift, which I noted here.

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ERC awards "Tracing Scribes and Scrolls" project €2.5M

RESEARCH FUNDING: Mladen Popović awarded ERC Advanced Grant to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Professor Mladen Popović has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of €2.5 million. Under the project title ‘Tracing Tribes and Scrolls’, he and his team will spend the next five years working in the laboratory and using AI to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ... (University of Groningen). HT the Bible Places Blog.

About Popović’s project
In the ‘Tracing Scribes and Scrolls’ project, Popović (Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society and interim dean of the Faculty of Arts) and his colleagues aim to trace the origins and creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the issue: using analytical chemistry, AI and palaeography (the study of handwriting), they aim to determine where the scrolls were made and written. This could shed new light on the historical and cultural context of the scrolls.

[...]

Congratulations to Professor Popović and his team!

Cross-file under Material Culture, Paleography, and Algorithm Watch.

UPDATE (1 July): More here.

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