Esther Eshel and I are proud to announce the publication of our latest book, “The Scribe in the Biblical World”!

This book offers a fresh look at the status of the scribe in society, his training, practices, and work in the biblical world. What was the scribe’s role in these societies? How many scripts and languages did they grasp? Were scribes redactors, or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? These are questions that were tackled during an international conference at the University of Strasbourg on June 17–19, 2019.

Beside organizing the conference and editing the volume, I also wrote a chapter on “Theonyms in Palaeo-Hebrew and Other Alternate Scripts on Dead Sea Scrolls”.

You can find out more about this volume on the publisher’s website.

Here is the table of contents:

Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois. Introduction | 1
Emanuel Tov. Approaches of Scribes to the Biblical Text in Ancient Israel | 3
André Lemaire. West Semitic Royal Scribes ca. 1250–600 BCE | 23
Sara Milstein. The Role of Legal Texts in Scribal Education: Implications for Biblical Law | 47
Aaron Demsky. Cursing an Authority: Scribal Tradition from Babylonia to Canaan and Back | 69
Jan Dušek. The ‘Nests’ of the Aramaic Scribal Culture in the Late 9th – Early 7th Centuries BCE Levant: An Attempt at Identification | 87
Anat Mendel-Geberovich. Judaean Glyptic Finds: An Updated Corpus and a Revision of Their Palaeography | 115
Stefan Jakob Wimmer. Hieratic Numerals on Iron Age Hebrew Tax Bullae | 139
Aren M. Wilson-Wright. Out of Egypt: Lexicographic Evidence for Egyptian Influence on West Semitic and Israelite Administrative and Scribal Practice | 163
Tania Notarius. Northwest Semitic – Akkadian Linguistic Convergence: *sipr- and Other Terms for ‘Writing’ as a Case Study | 183
William M. Schniedewind. Adaptation in Scribal Curriculum: Examples from the Letter Writing Genre | 203
Esther Eshel. Combining Different Types of Scripts in the Aramaic Texts | 233
Michael Langlois. Theonyms in Palaeo-Hebrew and Other Alternate Scripts on Dead Sea Scrolls | 249
Paul Mandel. Between סֹפֵר and סָפַר: The Evolution of the Second Temple Period ‘Scribe’ | 295
Guy D. Stiebel. Text Case: Writing under Extreme Conditions at Masada | 321
Jeffrey Stackert. Scribal Fatigue in Ancient Revisionary Composition | 343
Esther Eshel and Michael Langlois. Conclusion | 371
Index | 379