Book Announcement

Book Announcement: The Authority of the Septuagint

I’m excited to announce a new book coming out this October with IVP Academic, entitled The Authority of the Septuagint: Biblical, Historical, and Theological Approaches. This is a project that I have been working on with my friend and colleague, Gregory R. Lanier, who is a professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. Greg and I have worked on a number of projects together by now, all of them related to the Septuagint in some way or another.

This project is unique in a few ways. First of all, this book targets the issue highlighted in its title, namely probing whether and how “the Septuagint” has authority as a text. That is a loaded question, of course. In one sense, the answer is obviously no. Yet there are ways in which it is a little less obvious, especially when it comes to New Testament authors citing Septuagint-like texts in their writing. Greg and I addressed this issue in part in our book The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (Crossway), but this book takes things further. (more…)

Book Announcement: An Abridged Septuagint Reader

Just a brief post this morning to draw attention to a new book: Septuaginta: An Abridged Reader’s Edition (Hendrickson 2025), which you can buy in the usual places (e.g., Amazon). The concept is simple. This volume is a selection of passages drawn from the (much!) larger reader’s edition of the entire Septuagint corpus, which was published back in 2018. You can read more about the “big boy” version here.

Because the full reader’s edition is so huge (over 3,000 pages in two volumes), it’s on the more expensive side of things and not at all convenient to carry around. My editor Greg Lanier and I tossed around the idea of an abridged version for a while to help offset these issues, and now it’s done.

The content of the abridged reader’s edition is exactly the same as the “big boy” version, except there is 94% less of it. This slimmer volume clocks in at only 273 pages and you can get your hands on it for about $25. There are two main features of the abridged version that I really love:

  1. The seventy passages (get it?) that we selected are “the interesting ones,” meaning they include key events or theologically influential sections for NT authors. Selections come from all sections of the corpus: Pentateuch, Former and Latter Prophets, Wisdom, and  Deuterocanonicals, so you get a bit of everything.
  2. We have classified all of the passages into five difficulty levels and labeled each one, so that you’re aware of what you’re in for in terms of reading challenge.

So although it’s still a month until International Septuagint Day, it’s certainly not too early to celebrate, or to double down on your New Year’s resolution to read more Greek in 2025. Pick up a copy of this abridged reader for yourself.

PS. I recognize that my posts on this site have been very sparse in the last year, and I intend to post more often this year.

Book Announcement: Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text (Open Access)

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.) (more…)