Book Notes

013

A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave 4, Fascicle 2

Reconstructed and Edited by B.Z. Wacholder and M.G. Abegg
(Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992) 309 pp., $67.50

When Fascicle 1 of this projected 5-volume series appeared in 1991, it caused a major stir because of the backwards method used to reconstruct the texts (utilizing a computer to reconstitute texts from a concordance to those texts) and the widespread belief that it broke an official monopoly on unpublished material. The second fascicle has not caused as much excitement, though the reader can be more confident of the accuracy of its readings because the editors not only used their computer but also consulted photographs of the texts. In fact they occasionally note their disagreement with readings in the concordance. Wacholder and Abegg here make available the remains of 44 manuscripts that survive in 718 fragments (some are composite). In general, the documents are more fragmentary than those that appeared in the first fascicle. The editors classify many of the texts under the rubric Wisdom (19 of them) and the rest under Sectarian Scriptures. The latter category includes 4Q285, the fifth fragment of which is the so-called Pierced Messiah text (Wacholder and Abegg argue that it does not describe the Davidic messiah being killed). Scholars will be very happy to have this substantial collection of texts and the information about the photographs on which each appears, though the editors do not explain why they chose the ones that are published here. It will not, however, be of general use, since no translations or explanatory notes are given. Also, it should be noted that a few of the texts (such as 4Q370) are not, as the title claims, unpublished.

The Bible and the Moral Life

C. Freeman Sleeper
(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992) 181 pp., $14.99

With the current furor surrounding the interpretation of the Bible in various ethical controversies, the question Sleeper raises is timely: “Why do church bodies, each claiming to take Scripture as an authority, reach such different conclusions about the moral life?” Sleeper outlines four “styles of moral reflection” in which biblical writers engage—law, prophecy, apocalyptic and wisdom—and examines the ways recent mainline denominational public policy statements have used the Bible to discuss the issues of nuclear weapons and abortion. He proposes guidelines and helpful exercises for those who wish to use the Bible to talk about complex social problems as responsible interpreters of Scripture rather than merely partisans in the on-going battle over the Bible.

What Are They Saying About the Social Setting of the New Testament?

Carolyn Osiek
(revised and expanded edition; New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1992) 127 pp., $7.95

In the eight years since this little volume was first published, scholarly work on the social description of early Christianity has burgeoned. Osiek’s revised and expanded book describes the results of this voluminous research into the religious and cultural attitudes and social mores of Jews and pagans of the first-century Greco-Roman world. Discussions of differences and similarities between Judaism and Hellenism, economic and social status, the institution of slavery, household organization, and ecclesiastical structures are rounded out with a review of several social-science models currently employed by students of the New Testament, and the contributions of those models to the field.

Mark and Method: New Approach in Biblical Studies

ed. Janice Cap Anderson and Stephen D. Moore
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992), 192 pp., $11.95

Of the wide variety of methods for reading the Gospels, the five explored in this book are narrative criticism (an approach which treats the Gospel as a unified literary work), reader-response criticism (which asks about the effect of a document on its readers), deconstruction (which assumes that texts do not in themselves have any given shape or meaning but what readers attribute to them), feminist hermeneutics (which reads from the perspective of women’s experience) and social description (which inquires into the social setting of a book and its first readers). Five scholars each describe the goals and methods of one approach and the insight it offers about the Gospel of Mark. The editors preface these independent readings with a general introduction to the history of Gospel research and interpretations of Mark that attempts to set the frequently confusing proliferation of methods in context and assess their relative values.

Mastering Greek Vocabulary

Thomas A Robinson
(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), 178 pp., $7.95

Despite the title, this book is concerned solely with New Testament Greek vocabulary. It includes mnemonic aids, a list of 250 words directly taken over into English, a list of Greek cognates that appear more than 20 times in the New Testament and a list of derived English words. The volume’s novelty lies in its attempt to base its lists on the frequency of the occurrence of Greek word roots (rather than according to the frequency of occurrence of the words themselves). This is an excellent work, though some teachers will still prefer to use Bruce M. Metzger’s Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek, the classic work in its field.

A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave 4, Fascicle 2
Reconstructed and Edited by B.Z. Wacholder and M.G. Abegg
(Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992) 309 pp., $67.50