Book Announcement: Language and Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

It is with mixed emotions that I announce a new book that will be available this month with Bloomsbury T&T Clark publishers, Language and Identity in Hellenistic Judaism: Essays in Memory of James K. Aitken (here).

It’s always a pleasure to see a project come to fruition, and it was a pleasure working alongside my friends and colleagues Marieke Dhont and Chris Fresch. But as you can see in the subtitle to this volume, it is offered as a collection of essays in memory of my Doktorvater James K. Aitken, who died unexpectedly on Good Friday three years ago. You can read my tribute to him here.

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New Publications: Part 5

Mostly as a way to take a break from grading, I’m taking some time today to write about the fifth of five essays that went to press in 2025. I posted about four others here, here, here, and here.

This fifth essay is entitled “Reevaluating Parataxis in the Septuagint.” It appears in Subordination and Insubordination in Post-Classical Greek: From Syntax to Context, edited by Klaas Bentein, Eleonora Cattafi, and Ezra La Roi (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). This edited volume originated in a conference held way back in May 2022 at Ghent University. Although I was unable to attend in person, my friend and colleague Andrew Keenan read an early version of this paper for me.

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New Publications: Part 4

Today I want to highlight the fourth of five essays that have been published this year. (Three others already mentioned here, here, and here.) This particular publication is something a bit different from the others, all of which relate to the Septuagint in some way. This one is related to dictionaries, of all things.

This volume is edited by Ilan Stavans, who is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. A few years back, he asked me to contribute a chapter focused on ancient Greek to this collection of essays.

The book is titled rather accurately for its somewhat unconventional approach. Essentially, each chapter is structured as an interview or conversation between Stavans and another scholar. And each chapter addresses the history of dictionaries for a particular language. In addition to my chapter, there are others on German, English, Esperanto, and several others. This project was a lot of fun and allowed me to go further into the history of philology on the biblical languages.