RAMBI RULES! I've spent much of the last few days in the library photocopying more than forty articles that pertain mostly to the first two chapters of my book. I found almost all of these via RAMBI, the online index of articles on Jewish studies. I've mentioned RAMBI before here, but this is first time I've used it extensively for a major research project and its payoff was extraordinary. Besides the articles I found in our library, I found a few things I didn't know about in books I own, I ordered a few collections of essays via interlibrary loan, one of which just arrived, and I have a list of close to as many articles again which I can try to locate in local research libraries during our holiday in San Diego next month, with the residue hopefully to be picked up on a day trip to the Edinburgh University library and via Interlibrary loan. I also have a list a dozen or more articles that I may track down later if it looks like I need them. In the pre-Internet days it would have taken me weeks or months to find all this, and chances are that I would have missed many of the items RAMBI led me to. So be sure to include a visit to RAMBI early on in your research on ancient Judaism.

The downside, of course, is that now I have to read them all.