It is my pleasure to announce a new book that is available as of today: Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text, which has been published in the Cambridge Semitic Language and Cultures series with OpenBook Publishers in collaboration with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. It’s exciting to see this project come to fruition (more on that below), perhaps especially because we were able to arrange for open access to the volume. Yes, that means it’s free to download — that’s right, go ahead. (Or if you’d like, you can also order a hardcopy too.)

This volume is a collection of essays that I edited along with my friend and colleague, Elizabeth Robar. Since 2019 we have co-chaired the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group at the annual meeting of the Institute for Biblical Research. This volume emerged as the result of our 2021 session, along with a few other solicited contributions after the fact. Here’s an excerpt from the volume description:

As academic disciplines and academic publishing proliferate and become more complex in a digital and global context, synthesising volumes such as this one have taken on new importance for both specialists and generalists alike. That is particularly the case in interdisciplinary areas of research. This volume therefore sets out to make linguistic theory clearer and more accessible to biblical scholars in particular, not only by careful explanation but also by specific illustration, drawing upon ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages within the Christian biblical corpus. The volume assists the reader in distinguishing the separate assumptions and scope of study for the separate theories, recognising methods of approach that can be applied to any of the theories, and the role of an umbrella theory to enable all the others to fruitfully interact. The bibliographies provided are structured for the non-specialist, noting handbooks, companions, and glossaries, general introductions, and foundational texts. In so doing, this volume presents not only a fully up-to-date cross-section of linguistic research in biblical scholarship but also an explicit path into the field, while highlighting important avenues for continued investigation and collaboration.

Readers of this blog will know that my wheelhouse is of course Septuagint scholarship. But I do have other interests and research goals, of course. One of those is certainly linguistics and its application to the biblical languages. One of my previous projects in this area was the conference and eventual edited volume with Steve Runge on post-Classical Greek prepositions, which came out last year. I am currently involved in/contracted for a few significant other projects in the area of linguistics, which I will divulge more about here in due course.

My chapter in this present volume (as a hint towards the nature of those “other projects”) deals with Cognitive Linguistic theory, which tends to be my theoretical sandbox of choice in my research. In the spirit of the aims of the volume, my essay overviews the theory, its history, and demonstrates its potential — which could certainly be greatly expanded (*wink*) — for exegesis and interpretation of the biblical text.