John Rogerson

Their Place in Worship 3. The Psalms

thought appropriate for a particular Sunday. For the remaining Sundays in Trinity the psalms were worked through reasonably systematically, beginning with Psalm I and ending with Psalm 150. Under this scheme, worshippers who attended Morning and Evening prayer regularly on Sundays used almost all the psalms, and in many cases used some psalms more than once. However, the instructions for using the psalms in 1928 exhibited a slight distancing from the traditional commitment of the Church of England to the whole Psalter. One psalm, Psalm 58 was placed entirely in brackets as were parts of other psalms, the purpose of the brackets being to indicate material that could be omitted from use in public worship at the discretion of the minister. This deviation from the Church of England’s traditional posture became even

Book Reviews : Five German Old Testament Studies

question of wisdom schools, literary forms, the personification of Wisdom, Wisdom and the goddess, Wisdom at Qumran, Wisdom in nineteenth-century scholarship, and Wisdom and Old Testament theology. Interestingly, only one of the contributors is a woman (the patriarchy of the biblical Guild?): would an increased feminine perspective have added even greater breadth to the book? The work concludes with a short biographical note and bibliography of the writings of Professor Emerton.

Recent Continental Old Testament Literature

A striking feature of Old Testament scholarship in the past twenty years has been interest in the so-called second temple period, and especially in the province of Yehud within the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire. Previously, this aspect of ancient Israel’s history had been neglected for various reasons, including the scantiness of extra-biblical material as compared, for example, with the eighth century BCE and the availability of Assyrian records. The renewed interest in the Persian period has coincided with, and to some extent has been caused by, a growing conviction in Old Testament scholarship that compositions such as the Yahwist’s history were written during or after the exile rather than in the tenth-ninth centuries.

Book Reviews : Personal Testament To Myth

The latest volume in the magnificent Gottingen edition of the Septuagint, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum VIII, 5 Tobit (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [1983], DM 92.00, pp. 185, ISBN 3-525-53442-6) is devoted to Tobit, and the edition is by Robert Hanhart, the director of the entire project. The transmission of the Greek Tobit has taken place in a very complicated way, and this was made partly manifest even in early editions of the book. Here a distinction is made between no less than three text-forms, which are indicated as GI, GII and GIII. G’ is known from the Vaticanus and the majority of Greek manuscripts and versions in other languages; GII from the Sinaiticus, the Latin and some other manuscripts; Gill from a few Greek manuscripts and in part from the Syriac. These cannot be reduced to variants of one original text-form and the edition is content to register them separately. The Qumran fragments of Tobit, which have still not been published, seem on present evidence to agree entirely with the text of Q11. As usual with the series, a separate study will handle the text and textual history of Tobit For the present we register the fact that the meticulous standards of care in detail and excellence in presentation, which have been evidenced throughout the more recent volumes of the series, are fully maintained.