Accordance Bible Software has recently released a bunch of N.T. Wright resources, including his newly published and massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God. There are two bundles Accordance offers (here and here), and both are on sale this week.
I’ll be posting an extended book note on Wright’s new two-volume work before too long. Consider it a 2015 New Year’s resolution.
In the meantime, I commend to you Accordance 11, which I suspect will be a nice way to access and utilize Wright’s work.
It’s been a great year! Thank you–wait… wrong platform.
It’s a little silly, but WordPress.com put together a 2014 report for Words on the Word.
Here’s an excerpt from the report, which has fun data about page views, most-visited posts, top commenters, etc.:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 98,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.
Click here to read the report, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Did you know that you can get the entirety of Joy of Cooking in your iPhone or iPad?
The iconic and ever-useful cookbook would be hard to improve upon in its print edition (though some duct would help ours), but the iOS app does just that.
It’s currently on sale through New Year’s Day, $4.99 at the App Store. EDIT: They’ve changed the price twice since I posted. As of 12/22, it’s $6.99.
If I procure the app unto myself, I shall report back, but for now here’s a bit of what it claims to be able to do:
• Universal app supports both iPhone and iPad.
• Thousands of recipes and reference materials cover everything from enchiladas to lemon meringue pie.
• All materials are included in the app. No internet access is required.
• Pre-set digital timers enable you to get each recipe just right.
• Let the app speak each step aloud so you can concentrate on cooking, rather than reading.
• Navigate each recipe with simple voice commands. No need to touch the screen with sticky fingers!
• Thousands of photos and illustrations leave nothing to interpretation.
• Built-in menu-maker allows you to create a menu and use it to
navigate among recipes while you cook; you can even print it out or
email it to your guests.• Joy of Cooking classic red bookmarks help you keep track of several recipes at once.
• The Favorites list lets you store recipes that you want to cook again and again.
• Shopping lists can be created easily from one or more recipes.
• The Sleep-Block feature prevents your iPad from sleeping when you just want to cook.
• A switch to enable metric units can adapt recipes to your preference.
• A built-in conversion calculator makes it easy to substitute just
about anything. Want to know how many teaspoons are in a half-cup? That
answer, and many others, is just a few taps away.
…and more.
Here are a couple screenshots from the App Store:
Read more about this impresive-looking app here.
I’m not sure how the actual St. Nick would feel about iTechnology, but App Santa offers a surprisingly large selection of excellent iOS (and Mac) apps for sale, starting today.
A few highlights of apps I use (and like):
And a few apps that I haven’t reviewed (but will soon) that look sweet:
Find them all (and others) here.
Now that I’ve made it through Black Friday without (a) buying anything or (b) blogging about any sales….
TextExpander Touch is on sale at the App Store for $1.99. Given how long it can take to type long swaths of text on an iPad or iPhone, TextExpander is a great time-saver, especially for stock replies or snippets (e.g., if you email directions to your house a lot).
Here is my review of TextExpander. You can find the app for sale here.
If you’re at SBL/AAR 2014 this last day, Accordance Bible Software is offering the best deal I’ve ever seen from them: $250 gets you the (normally $499) Essential Collection.
The deal is only available for new users. If you’re trying to decide what you think, you can see my Accordance 10 review series here, and my initial impressions of the new Accordance 11.
Here are a few other booths you might check out, too, before the conference ends.
The best (only?) complete set of books on the Greek Pentateuch is now up on Pre-Pub through Logos Bible Software: John William Wevers’s Notes on the Greek Text.
The Society of Biblical Literature’s book page has a helpful write-up of the Deuteronomy volume, which gives a sense of what this series is about:
Wevers [spent] most of his adult life studying the Septuagint, the last thirty years being devoted to the Pentateuch. The author considers the Greek text to be the first commentary on the Pentateuch ever written (in the third century B.C.E.) and not merely a collection for emendations of the Hebrew text. The work focuses on how the translator accomplished his task and on the vocabulary and syntax of the resulting text, rather than on either scholarly opinions on the text or how interpreters subsequently used the text. The Notes are intended for students who would like to use the Greek intelligently but are not specialists in Hellenistic Greek or LXX studies.
You can find the 5-volume set on pre-pub at Logos here. Wevers also wrote valuable LXX-Pentateuch text histories, which are available free online in .pdf form, detailed here.
The Annual Meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion is this week: November 22-25.
I’m not going, but if I were, here are the three exhibitor booths I would head to first:
I love Eisenbrauns’s books. Look especially for this deal.
And Carta is fast becoming one of my favorite publishers. At the very least, treat yourself to a look inside Carta’s magnificent Sacred Bridge (or see some images here). Carta will be featuring new titles like Understanding Biblical Archaeology (by Paul Wright) and Understanding the Alphabet of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
You can see Accordance 11 for yourself. Check out their booth for some even-better-than-usual conference discounts this year, as well as some new releases.
More specifically, at SBL/AAR (and ETS) you’ll find:
You can get the whole 17-volume set of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works at a discounted price ($564; regular price is $940), which includes a free copy of Interpreting Bonhoeffer (a good book). See my look inside the brand-new DBWE 17.
Fortress has just released The Fortress Commentary on the Bible, which they’re offering at the special conference rate of $78 (regular price is $120).
There’s a 30% general discount, too, with some deeper discounts on ebooks. All of what Fortress has to offer (including sessions) is here.
Whether you’re at the conference or not, here are three collections of really low-priced ebooks.
Happy book-hunting!
UPDATE: I nearly forgot to mention again that the BHS Reader’s Hebrew Bible is 50% off at Hendrickson’s booth. More here.
You Google yourself about every three months, too, right?
To my surprise, a few months ago I found that Words on the Word had been quoted in a Brill book about digital humanities in biblical studies. (Apparently “digital humanities” is an academic field in which this blog participates.)
Here is one of the citations:
The book is called Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish and Early Christian Studies, edited by Claire Clivaz, Andrew Gregory, and David Hamidović. Words on the Word makes its appearance in the chapter called “The Seventy and Their 21st-Century Heirs. The Prospects for Digital Septuagint Research.”
The footnote in the image above cites this primer I wrote on the Göttingen Septuagint; part 2 of the primer also receives mention.
Here is the publisher’s description of the book:
Ancient texts, once written by hand on parchment and papyrus, are now increasingly discoverable online in newly digitized editions, and their readers now work online as well as in traditional libraries. So what does this mean for how scholars may now engage with these texts, and for how the disciplines of biblical, Jewish and Christian studies might develop? These are the questions that contributors to this volume address. Subjects discussed include textual criticism, palaeography, philology, the nature of ancient monotheism, and how new tools and resources such as blogs, wikis, databases and digital publications may transform the ways in which contemporary scholars engage with historical sources. Contributors attest to the emergence of a conscious recognition of something new in the way that we may now study ancient writings, and the possibilities that this new awareness raises.
You can find the book at Brill here and here at Amazon. Looks fun! But, of course, now I’m biased.
Words on the Word 