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Through June 11, the Westminster Bookstore is offering a free PDF download of Iain Duguid’s Is Jesus in the Old Testament? (P&R, 2013). Duguid has been at Grove City College but has recently joined the Westminster Seminary faculty. According to its introduction, Duguid’s essay (the text is a brief 33 pages of prose) has the following major components to its argument: ...

This month, Logos Bible Software has Frederic Perthes’ Life of John Chrysostom (John P. Jewett, 1854) available for free. According to Logos’s description, Based on the investigations of Neander, Böhringer, and others, Life of John Chrysostom details the “golden-mouthed” orator’s influence on Asia Minor. It offers a look into his role as preacher and bishop, his interactions with different sects and notable persons during his life, and an exacting account of his three-year exile. ...

Ben Witherington, Through June 16, Ben Witherington’s What’s in the Word: Rethinking the Socio-Rhetorical Character of the New Testament (Baylor, 2009) is available for free from Logos Bible Software. In sum, “Expanding on the work in which he has been fruitfully engaged for over a quarter century, Witherington challenges the previously assured results of historical criticism and demonstrates chapter by chapter how the socio-rhetorical study shifts the paradigm.” The volume discusses concerns related to orality and canon, and includes several chapters treating particular texts or phrases within the New Testament. ...

Walter Brueggemann, The June free book of the month seems already to be live on the Logos Bible Software website. The included text is Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms (Fortress, 2001). The optional, $0.99 add on is Brueggemmann’s David’s Truth: In Israel’s Imagination and Memory (Fortress, 2002). ...

Google Books has two volumes of Christoph Friedrich Ammon’s Biblische Theologie (Erlangen: J. J. Palm, 1801) available in various full-text formats ( vol. 1, vol. 2).

Kevin Vanhoozer, ed., For this week, Kevin Vanhoozer’s edited volume on the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament is free from Logos Bible Software when users join a Baker-related email list (HT: Tayler Beede). The volume provides a focused selection of the book-specific entries from the larger Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“120”] William Baird, History of New Testament Research (3 vols.)[/caption] With last year’s release of the third volume, From C. H. Dodd to Hans Dieter Betz, William Baird brought his helpful series on the recent history of New Testament Studies to a close. Cliff Kvidahl has an informative review that, despite some criticisms, rightly praises Baird’s work as “informative while remaining entertaining. [Baird] brings the reader through the life and work of each scholar without getting bogged down in too much detail.” Those interested can also find the whole 3-volume set available among Logos Bible Software’s prepublication listings. ...

After having the product available for over 10 years, Logos Bible Software has released a substantive update to their Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts database (ed. Martin Abegg). Most significant among this update’s improvements are that the resource: Now contains more than 100 scrolls than in the previous version (737 documents are now represented). Several texts in the previous version have been reorganized to reflect the latest scholarship on their reconstruction. The database’s morphology has been updated to WHM 4.18. For more information, please see the Logos blog. ...

Thanks to Anthony Le Donne for noting the availability of LibriVox recordings for D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus. LibriVox also has apps available for Android, iOS, and Kindle users, and the iOS version (at least) allows downloading and storage for offline listening. ...

Select Works of Simon Kistemaker Now garnering interest in Logos Bible Software’s prepublication program are 6 volumes of select works from Simon Kistemaker. The collection mostly contains items related to the Gospels but also includes an edited volume of hermeneutics essays and a survey of Calvinist history and thought. ...

[caption id=“attachment_2129” align=“alignright” width=“87”] Richard Bauckham[/caption] In his 2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham suggests: that we need to recover the sense in which the Gospels are testimony. This does not mean that they are testimony rather than history. It means that the kind of historiography they are is testimony. An irreducible feature of testimony as a form of human utterance is that it asks to be trusted. This does not mean that it asks to be trusted uncritically, but it does mean that testimony should not be treated as credible only to the extent that it can be independently verified. There can be good reasons for trusting or distrusting a witness, but these are precisely reasons for trusting or distrusting. Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony. . . . It is true that a powerful trend in the modern development of critical historical philosophy and method finds trusting testimony a stumbling-block in the way of the historian’s autonomous access to truth that she or he can verify independently. But it is also a rather neglected fact that all history, like all knowledge, relies on testimony. ( 5; italics original) ...

[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“alignright” width=“56”] WTS Books[/caption] Through September 3, the Westminster Bookstore has select Ed Clowney resources available at half-off, including: How Jesus Transforms the Ten Commandments Preaching and Biblical Theology Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament(2nd ed) As usual, the Bookstore has also included some related, free PDF or multimedia material on these books’ product pages. ...

According to Amazon, Special pricing is available on select Kindle Fire tablets to Amazon Student members with an active Prime account (six months free or $39/year plan). Join Amazon Student or start your discounted Prime membership to take advantage of this discount. The promo codes below will become available 24 hours after activation of your account, through September 1. New members, don’t forget to check your .edu email and verify your account. ...

Recently, I noted that an English Standard Version audio Bible was freely available with registration at Bible.is. This version’s Old Testament is also still freely available in MP3 format on Amazon. ...

J. Alan Groves Center The J. Alan Groves Center has released version 4.18 for the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) and the Westminster Hebrew Morphology (WHM). According to the Center’s notice, this update includes: 41 sets of lemma changes, 85 sets of parsing changes, 16 textual changes with an associated change in bracket notes, the addition of the bracket note “]n” (which designates an unusual or unexpected form) to almost 100 words, 24 other changes to bracket notes, 5 other textual changes, and 5 changes to morphological slashes and/or word divisions. Changes to the text are to make the WHM and the WLC conform to the text of the Hebrew Bible found in the Leningrad Codex. ...

Scripture Tools for Every Person Tyndale House recently announced the beta release of their Scripture Tools for Every Person (STEP) project, headed by David Instone-Brewer. The resource includes a nice selection of original-language texts—apparently including some, like the [Samaritan Pentateuch](http://www.stepbible.org/#!__/0/passage/0/SP/Gen 1/NHV/__/1/singleColumn), not yet listed in the documentation. Later this year, the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament should also appear in STEP. ...

Jesus is both the properly trusting recipient of his Father’s care and the hen that would gather her chicks to protect them.

Faithlife ESV Giveaway The English Standard Version is now free for a limited time with the Faithlife Study Bible ( affiliate disclosure). According to the press release, Starting July 24, anyone who downloads or signs in to the Faithlife Study Bible app will get the English Standard Version free for life! All Faithlife Study Bible app users will get a full license to the ESV Bible, including offline access when Internet is not available. Users can download their free copy of the Faithlife Study Bible app by visiting the Faithlife/ESV giveaway page anytime 12:00 am [Pacific], July 24–11:59 pm, August 10. ...

Logos Bible Software Recently, a number of noteworthy works have come into Logos Bible Software’s prepublication and community pricing programs. On the prepublication program are collections about biblical backgrounds (9 vols.; T. & T. Clark), the Prophets (16 vols.; T. & T. Clark), the Writings (5 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Old Testament literature and linguistics (7 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Hebrew Bible (7 vols.; T. & T. Clark), topics in Old Testament Studies (11 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Old Testament theology (9 vols.; Oxford University), biblical history and historiography (3 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Jewish Studies (6 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Jesus (10 vols.; T. & T. Clark); the Gospels and Acts (18 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Johannine literature (10 vols.; T. & T. Clark), the Pauline Epistles (10 vols.; T. & T. Clark), topics in New Testament Studies (11 vols.; T. & T. Clark), early Christianity (13 vols.; T. & T. Clark), apocrypha and pseudepigrapha (7 vols.; T. & T. Clark), Apostolic Fathers (29 vols.; various publishers), church history (18 vols.; Oxford); biblical interpretation (3 vols.; Pontifical Biblical Commission and 5 vols.; T. & T. Clark), biblical languages (35 vols.; Zondervan), bibliology (7 vols.; T. & T. Clark), the Bible in art (3 vols.; Standard), theological interpretation (4 vols.; T. & T. Clark), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (3 vols.; T. & T. Clark), as well as the select Loeb Classical Library works by Tertullian and Minucius Felix (2 vols.) and Virgil (4 vols.). ...

Pieter Lasman, ‘The Triumph of Mordechai’ (1624; Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons) In 1 Sam 15:3, Samuel commands Saul, the son of Kish, “Go, and strike Amalek, and devote to destruction everything that is his. Do not take pity on him, but kill man and woman, child and infant, ox and lamb, camel and donkey” (לך והכיתה את־עמלק והחרמתם את־כל־אשר־לו ולא תחמל עליו והמתה מאיש עד־אשה מעלל ועד־יונק משור ועד־שה מגמל ועד־חמור).‭ 1 ‬ Unfortunately, Saul’s subsequent engagement with the Amalekites heeded only Samuel’s order to “go and strike Amalek” (לך והכיתה את־עמלק).‭ 2 ‬ Saul “did devote to destruction” (החרים) the Amalekite people but captured alive Agag, the king. 3 Indeed, “Saul and the people had pity on Agag and on the best of the flock and the herd and their choice offspring, on the lambs, and on everything good, and they did not accept devoting them to destruction, but every despised and weak thing they devoted to destruction” (ויחמל שאול והעם על־אגג ועל־מיטב הצאן והבקר והמשנים ועל־הכרים ועל־כל־הטוב ולא אבו החרימם וכל־המלאכה נמבזה ונמס אתה החרימו).‭ 4 ‬ Thus, Saul becomes the object of Samuel’s ire and forfeits the continuation of his kingdom. 5 ...

Baker and the Stone-Campbell Journal were kind enough to provide a copy of Tom Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. According to the publisher’s description, Schreiner: ...

As their free book of the month, Logos Bible Software is giving away volume 5 of the Expositor’s Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll. Volume 5 includes: J. H. A. Hart, “The First Epistle General of Peter” R. H. Strachan, “The Second Epistle General of Peter” David Smith, “The Epistles of John” J. B. Mayor, “The General Epistle of Jude” James Moffatt, “The Revelation of St. John the Divine” For more information about the text and to download this volume, please see here. ...

The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 56, no. 2 includes the following: Jason DeRouchie, “The Blessing-Commission, the Promised Offspring, and the Toledot Structure of Genesis” Jeffrey Niehaus, “God’s Covenant with Abraham” Douglas Petrovich, “Identifying Nimrod of Genesis 10 with Sargon of Akkad by Exegetical and Archaeological Means” Todd Scacewater, “Galatians 2:11–21 and the Interpretive Context of ‘Works of the Law’” Andrew Wilson, “Apostle Apollos?” Keith Campbell, “The American Evangelical Academy and the World: A Challenge to Practice More Globally” Gerald McDermott, “The Emerging Divide in Evangelical Theology” Daniel Strange, “For Their Rock Is Not as Our Rock: The Gospel as the ‘Subversive Fulfillment’ of the Religious Other”

Google Books as a combined full-text PDF of K. W. Krüger’s Griechische sprachlehre für Schulen (1861). The two tomes make for a combined PDF of just over 1100 pages.

While this year’s SBL program is still in preparation, the contents of the IBR research group sessions are now available via the individual research group links on the call for papers page. Update: After copying this link yesterday, the call for papers page URL was apparently updated. Such is the Internet; the link above has now been corrected to reflect the current page location (HT: Joseph Kelly, Kirk Lowery). ...

Baker has kindly provided a substantial PDF excerpt from Christopher Seitz’s The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two-Testament Bible (2011). Besides front matter, the excerpt includes the book’s introduction and first chapter, which account for 74 pages of text. ...

Baker Academic has an interesting, three-part interview with Edith Humphrey about her new book Scripture and Tradition.

Zondervan has kindly made available a PDF containing Eckhard Schnabel’s treatment of Acts 25:1–26:32 in his Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament volume (HT: Jesse Hillman).

In addition to the Justification and Variegated Nomism set, Logos Bible Software now has recently added three other Mohr-Siebeck resources to their pre-publication program: Karel Jongeling and Robert Kerr, eds., Late Punic Epigraphy Matthias Henze, The Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel Mark Smith, God in Translation

On the web: Logos Bible Software adds select works of C. K. Barrett and the Justification and Variegated Nomism set to their pre-publication program. Lawrence Schiffman considers Jubilees’ rationale for Torah’s commandments. J.-L. Simonet comments on what may be some newly-identified lectionary leaves. Tommy Wasserman notes the forthcoming Biblia Graeca from Eisenbrauns.