HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO PALEOJUDAICA! Today is this blog's second anniversary. This was its very first post and this is my first anniversary post a year ago.

The post with the most hits in the last year was an announcement of plans for the publication of the rumor-shrouded Coptic Gospel of Judas, kindly relayed by Pierluigi Piovanelli. Thanks to a link from Instapundit a week later, the post received several thousand hits in one day.

I think my favorite post in the last year is one from December on "Philo or the Pseudepigrapha?", in which I ranked our ancient Jewish sources for their importance as NT background and summarized some of the issues treated in the book I was finishing on the methodology of studying the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. For more favorite posts of the last two years, follow the Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts link. One major innovation this year has been the opening of my temporary blog Qumranica for my course on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I recently submitted an article to the SBL Forum for a thematic issue on biblioblogging, tentatively scheduled for publication in April. Much of the material for that article covers major PaleoJudaica posts in the last year, so I won't anticipate myself by giving the sort of detailed review I did last year. When the piece comes out, I'll put in a link in an update to this post.

It's been a good but exhausting year and blogging has helped keep it fun. And as long as the blogging stays fun, I imagine I'll keep doing it. A couple of times I have caught myself sitting down wearily to write a post out of a sense of duty rather than because I felt like it. I trashed those posts as soon as I realized what I was doing. PaleoJudaica doesn't aim to cover everything, but I do try to keep track of many of the things that look interesting to me and to comment when I have something to say and time to say it. I hope some of it has been fun and interesting for readers too.

It's worth remarking on how blogging, including biblical studies blogging (or "biblioblogging," if you must) continues to expand. This time last year there were not many blogs in this area: PaleoJudaica; Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog; AKMA's Random Thoughts; Stephen Carlson's Hypotyposeis; Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria blog; Ruben Gomez's Bible Software Review blog; and Tim Bulkeley SansBlogue. The Bible and Interpretation News website functioned much like a blog. David Meadows's Rogue Classicism, David Nishimura's Cronaca, Christine's Mirabilis, and Rebecca Lesses's Mystical Politics also sometimes had (and have) related material.

But in the last year quite a few other biblioblogs have started up. I can't keep track of them all, but some of the ones I try to keep an eye on include Ed Cook's Ralph the Sacred River; Jim West's Biblical Theology blog; Eric Sowell's The Coding Humanist; Seth Sanders's Serving the Word; Michael Homan's blog; Helenann Hartley's blog; Peter Kirby's Christian Origins blog; Michael Pahl's The Stuff of Earth; Joe Weak's Macintosh Biblioblog; Zeth's Biblioblog blog; Rick Brannan's ricoblog; Zhubert's blog; Dr Cathey's blog. Michael Turton's The Sword; Joel Ng's Ebla Logs; Justin Dombrowski's Midrash Le-Justin; and Daniel Driver's Figured Out. Gee, that was hard to stop once I'd started (and apologies to those I've missed). My point is made: this looks like geometric growth to me. Blogging is becoming ever more popular and people are starting blogs by the million. Many won't last but some will, and a few of those will be very good. For reasons explained in the promised SBL article, I do not think that blogging is a passing fad, and I look forward to ever more sophisticated forms of democratized media as time goes on.

According to Technorati, PaleoJudaica currently has 164 links from 126 other blogs. The counter stands at 110,852 individual hits, 68,243 of them in the last year. In the last two years, 1,074,454 words, apart from this entry, have posted on PaleoJudaica, 741,763 of them in the last year. (I hasten to add that most of them were quotations from other people!) There have been over 1700 individual hits and over 2300 page views in the last week. So in the last year links from other blogs have increased by a factor of almost 2.5 and individual hits have increased by a factor of over 1.5. Weekly individual hits are up too, although this may be partly a blip due to a link from a popular Portuguese blog about a week ago. None of these statistics are at all reliable, but they do at least indicate positive trends.

Once again, please keep visiting PaleoJudaica, keep telling your friends about it, keep sending me items, and keep letting me know when you think I've gotten something wrong. And maybe think about starting a blog yourself.