014
Gros Louis and Milgrom Share Award for Best Article in Bible Review
“Different Ways of Looking at the Birth of Jesus,” BR 01:01, by Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, and “You Shall Not Boil a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk,” BR 01:03, by Jacob Milgrom, have been selected joint winners of the Fellner Award as the best articles to appear in Bible Review during 1985 and 1986. The award carries a prize of $500.
Gros Louis is the vice president of Indiana University and a professor of English and Comparative literature. He is also the editor of Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, published by Abingdon Press.
Milgrom is professor of Hebrew and Bible at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of its Jewish Studies program. He is a past recipient of the Rabbi Solomon Goldman Award for Literary Creativity. In 1968, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the Temple Scroll, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the author of “Challenge to Sun-Worship Interpretation of Temple Scroll’s Gilded Staircase,” BAR 11:01.
The judges, whose decisions are reported here, were BR board member Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, director of the Ph. D. Studies Program and associate professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.
Explaining their choices, Sakenfeld and Schiffman commented that “Gros Louis introduces his readers to the excitement of the fine art of literary analysis of Biblical texts. His refreshing approach to the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke highlights the differences often obscured by popular Christmas traditions, thus calling attention to the purposes of the respective accounts.” Milgrom’s article, they noted, is a “penetrating analysis” that “disputes the reading of an Ugaritic text that has long been used to explain the biblical injunction against ‘boil[ing] a kid in its mother’s milk.’ Milgrom masterfully explains how the rabbis deduced from this injunction the requirement that milk and meat must be kept totally apart.”
Funds for the award were donated by the Leopold and Clara M. Fellner Charitable Foundation. A corresponding award for the best article in our sister publication Biblical Archaeology Review was announced in BARlines, BAR 13:01.
King Named SBL President
Philip J. King, a member of BR’s editorial advisory board, has been designated president-elect of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) for 1987.
King has also served as president of the Catholic Biblical Association and, for six years, as president of the American Schools of Oriental Research. He will be the first person to hold the presidencies of these three major scholarly organizations.
A professor of biblical studies at Boston College, King is the author of American Archaeology in the Mideast. He is currently completing an archaeological commentary on the eighth-century B.C. Hebrew prophets. His essay “Teaching the Bible and Living Its Message” appears in My View.
Gros Louis and Milgrom Share Award for Best Article in Bible Review
