Michael Langlois

The course of Old Testament Textual Criticism that I teach at the School of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the Catholic University of Paris starts tomorrow!

This discipline consists in the comparison and evaluation of biblical manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Syriac, and so on. In what way do they differ? Can we retrieve the original biblical text? Answer: tomorrow at 4 PM!

This is the title of the chapter I published in the new volume dedicated to the Young Hero.
If you find this title intriguing, there’s one thing to do: read the chapter! Here it is in PDF format. Enjoy!

Michael Langlois, « Loin des yeux, non du cœur : l’héroïsme selon Daniel » in Le jeune héros. Recherches sur la formation et la diffusion d’un thème littéraire au Proche-Orient ancien, éd. par Jean-Marie Durand, Thomas Römer et Michael Langlois (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 250), Fribourg, Academic Press / Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011, p. 242-258.

Samson, David, Daniel or Gilgamesh are some of the most famous heroes in biblical and mesopotamian literature. These characters are the object of a new book entitled “The Young Hero,” that I edited together with J.-M. Durand and Th. Römer.

To give you a taste, here is the table of contents: Read the rest of this entry »

I have been invited to speak at an international conference on the Targums (Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible) in the light of ancient Jewish traditions from the Second Temple period (i.e. until the beginning of the common era).

My paper will address the question of a possible Second Temple origin for the critique of power in the targumim. If you’re interested, the conference will take place in Strasbourg on June 27-28, 2011.

Here is the meeting program: Read the rest of this entry »

Who are the fallen angels? Where do they come from? What are their names? This last question caught my attention, and I invite you to discover my conclusions in the following paper:

Langlois, Michael. “Shemihazah et compagnie(s). Onomastique des anges déchus dans les manuscrits araméens du Livre d’Hénoch” in Aramaica Qumranica. Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June – 2 July 2008, edited by Katell Berthelot and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, Leiden – Boston, Brill, 2010, 145-180.