HAPPY SIXTH BLOGIVERSARY TO PALEOJUDAICA! My first (introductory) post is here and the first substantive post is here. Past anniversary posts: 2004 (1st), 2005 (2nd), 2006 (3rd), 2007 (4th), 2008 (5th).

Here are some of my favorite posts over the last year. For subjects that got a lot of coverage, I've just picked posts in which I had something substantive (if sometimes brief) to say.

Enema instructions in ancient Aramaic?

Doctor Who meets the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

David Noel Freedman 1922-2008

Tutela Valui
(Most popular post of the year, receiving several thousand hits. Must be the Latin.)

Good snow here

The Vision of Gabriel: here, here, here, and here.

The Gedalyahu ben Pashur seal: here and here

British New Testament Conference 2008

The Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription: here, here, and here. Is that thing published yet?

SBL 2008

Rosslyn Chapel

Ralphies 2008

The Kilduncan Stone in St. Andrews

Martin Luther King Jr. and biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha

Ancient Neoplatonist libraries and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

The Persepolis Cuneiform Archive controversy

The Dead Sea Scrolls sock puppet scandal and the Golb arrest: here, here, here, and here.

Rachel Elior's theory that there were no Essenes: here, here, and here.

I have meetings all day today (the 24th) until late afternoon, so I'm preposting this the evening before. But I'll try to add some annual statistics at some point on the day.

UPDATE: This is posting number 5960 for PaleoJudaica (905 posts this year). The counter stands at 593,295 total individual hits (and 832,415 total page views) and PaleoJudaica is currently ranked at number 41,812 by Technorati. That's 117,404 individual hits in the last year and an ascent of 23,756 places in the Technorati ranking. A year ago Technorati indexed 112.8 million blogs. I can't find the current number, but it had gone up to 133 million still in 2008.

As always, please keep sending me items of interest and please do keep reading PaleoJudaica.