John Huehnergard has added 67 papers to his academia.edu page.  Enjoy.

Have you ever wanted to do an M.A. in Biblical Studies?  Now you can.  I’ve composed a great curriculum for you from open courses through iTunes U and university web pages (the selection is based on my own biases and whims as well as the available offerings).  While there are a few more classes than you might encounter in a traditional M.A. program, you don’t have a thesis or big research papers to submit so it balances out.  If you make it through the entire program drop me a line and I’ll email you a diploma.

Old Testament Introduction from Christine Hayes at Yale.

Pentateuch from John Goldingay at Fuller Seminary.

The Prophets from John Goldingay at Fuller Seminary.

Jerusalem: The Holy City: A History of Jerusalem from Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel from Robert Cargill at UCLA.

New Testament Introduction from Dale Martin at Yale.

Historical Jesus from Thomas Sheehan at Stanford.

Biblical Hermeneutics from John Goldingay at Fuller Seminary.

Introduction to Ancient Greek History from Donald Kagen at Yale.

Ancient Mediterranean World from Isabelle Pafford at UC Berkeley.

Theories and Methods in the Study of History from Anne McCants at MIT.

Introduction to Practical Reasoning and Critical Analysis of Argument from Daniel Coffeen at UC Berkeley.

Introduction to the Theory of Literature from Paul Fry at Yale.

Writing and Reading the Essay from Rebecca Blevins Faery at MIT.

Introduction to Linguistics from Suzanne Flynn at MIT.

Geography of World Cultures from Martin Lewis at Stanford.

One of Simo Parpola’s more controversial proposals–that the Neo-Assyrians had a form of monotheism–is available for free on scribd, “Monotheism in Ancient Assyria.”  This essay first appeared in One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World: Essays on the concept of monotheism/polytheism in ancient Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Israel, ed. Barbara Nevling Porter. Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute, Vol. 1, 2000, pp. 165-209.  Enjoy!

You can download free pdf files of the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices (among others) at Seforim Online.  The ID number for Leningrad is 264 and Aleppo is 262 (normal res) and 263 (hi res).

HT: Thanks to David Everson for the link to the site and the Leningrad Codex and to Danny Frese and Daniel Wilson for the heads up on Aleppo.

A good friend of mine reminded me that articles in the journal Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici sul Vicino Oriente Antico (SEL) are available for free download–and there are many articles there worth your while.

Also, on the Digital Orient blog Dominique Charpin has made available one of his papers entitled, “L’historien face aux archives paléo-babyloniennes” in which he discusses the historian’s dilemma when faced with a huge amount of data published in many and various (and many times obscure) places.  This is exactly the problem that faces anyone studying Mesopotamia and Charpin gives a guide on how to navigate through Old Babylonian archives.  Enjoy!

Yale University has a number of free lectures and class materials available online.  I previously mentioned the Old Testament Intro course taught by Christine Hayes but they also have a more recently added New Testament Intro taught by Dale B. Martin.  These are full classes with accompanying reading assignments and materials.  While you are there also check out the Ancient Greek History class taught by Donald Kagan.

I have been meaning to post about some helpful resources: a COS/ANET index (incredibly this was left out of the COS volumes) and an index for the Anchor (Yale) Bible Dictionary including author/translator and title–both of these indexes were compiled by Kevin Edgecomb.  Also, if you are teaching or learning from Alan Ross’s Hebrew grammar, Phillip Marshall has some very helpful answer keys and extra drill sheets and stuff (amazingly, the publisher does not provide answer keys to this grammar).

Another CDLJ article is available for free download.  This article publishes the cuneiform collection of Florida State University.  It mostly consists of Ur III tablets from Umma.  Everything is pretty standard.  

It seems that every translator of Neo-Sumerian has a somewhat different view of how to translate various terms.  I found it interesting that the authors of this article translated giri3 PN as “under the authority of PN.”  While there is an aspect of this involved, it seems that the recent consensus is to see the giri3 official as a “conveyer” or someone who oversees the physical transport of an item(s).  This view coheres with the meaning of giri3 as “foot.”  

Also they include a personal name that I was not previously aware of: Giri3-d-Shara-i3-dab5.  However, this name is listed in the onomastics section of the BDTNS as Gir3-d-Shara which I think makes more sense.  The former reading would mean something like: “He received the foot of Shara” while the latter makes more sense: “He received the might of Shara.” Furthermore, it might be that the i3-dab5 is not part of the name but the verb, “he received.”

Christine Proust, a researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, has a new article out in CDLJ.  Here is the introduction:

§1.1. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to analyze some normative aspects of metrological and numerical notations in mathematical cuneiform texts; second, to examine issues raised by modern conventions of transliterations.

§1.2. The argument presented in this paper relies mainly on Old Babylonian school tablets because these sources bear deep traces of normalization processes, and they serve as examples that elucidate the principles of notations used in mathematical texts. In the Old Babylonian period, metrology and place value notation were taught in scribal schools in which this knowledge made up the first level of the mathematical curriculum. School tablets provide us with valuable evidence of the elements that the teachers considered essential. Thus, they constitute a good source for understanding the new concepts involved in numeration and metrology that emerged at the end of the 3^rd millennium BC.

§1.3. From a methodological point of view, the paper will for the most part depend on the visual properties of the tablets, and will examine closely the way in which the texts are displayed. This kind of analysis potentially yields a classification of graphemes most similar to that of ancient scribes. In another respect, this paper is based on the general principles and functional classification of graphemes developed by CDLI collaborators.^[2] It contains, moreover, an attempt to import the descriptive system of graphemes used in the field of Mycenaean epigraphy.^[3]

§1.4. This paper will first present a detailed analysis of texts used in scribal schools to teach metrological notations (§§2-3) and place value notation (§4). Problems raised by the distinction between positional and non-positional numbers will then be examined (§5). The last section (§6) advances some practical suggestions for a greater standardization of the transliteration of mathematical texts.

I just stumbled upon an audio lecture that Tonia Sharlach gave to the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University entitled: “Women in the Religion of Iraq in the Twenty-first Century BC.”