The Naked Bible

Posted By MSH on February 13, 2010

That’s right. No kidding.

For those who know don’t know what the Göttingen LXX is, it’s the premier critical text edition of the Septuagint.  There are 24 volumes in print, each of which go for $150 or more in print.  That’s $3600 for the set.  Plus it’s in electronic form so you can do lots of crazy searching in it in any language in the text, and link it to other Greek and English resources. But you can get it for $300. How? Read on.

Readers know I don’t usually blog about Logos stuff, but I’m making another exception here. I’ve been given the go-ahead to blog about some items we have on pre-pub that are almost at the point where we can push the button on the project. The Göttingen LXX is one of those.

Here’s how the Logos pre-pub system works. We get licenses to books and then “pre-pub” them.  That means the titles or collections get put on our website and offered at a very steep discount — one that will never be offered again. We take your credit card number but do not charge you until the day the items ships. We do this to try and gain enough “pre-publication” orders to meet our costs for the project from Day One. (And sometimes we do it to gauge interest in some niche item — like the Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon that’s sitting on a shelf in the office right now). If items don’t meet their cost, they may languish on the pre-pub page for a long time. It happens. We do this to be fiscally responsible and to give customers wild discounts. Lastly, I get ZERO commission on any sales. Not my department.

Göttingen and others are literally a couple orders away from pushing that button. I’d encourage you to click through the list below. I’ve picked a few items off the pre-pub page that are ever so close to going over the line, as we like to say at Logos.  They are all just a handful of orders away from becoming a reality.

Göttingen Septuagint (65 Vols.) – check it out – you’ll never see this price again.

Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament – If you liked John Walton’s book on Genesis 1 you’ll love this.

Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey – Rick Hess’s recent (excellent) book.

Continuum Near Eastern History Collection (13 Vols.) – these are all very expensive scholalry monographs, available in digital for a fraction of the cost. The same goes for the next four links:

Second Temple Judaism Studies Collection (7 Vols.)

Library of Hebrew Bible/OT Studies: JSOTS on Ketuvim (7 Vols.)

Library of Hebrew Bible/OT Studies: JSOTS on Nevi’im (7 Vols.)

Near Eastern History Collection (9 Vols.)

Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (2 Vols.) – you can find this on the web as a PDF of very poor page scans (translation: the text is ugly and almost unreadable in places). That means it can’t be searched. Ours is completely retyped and searchable, with links to other important tools.

BHS Helps Collection (3 Vols.) – These are terrific resources for understanding the textual apparatus of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (the Hebrew Bible used by most people nowadays). Very useful for work in textual criticism.

A Manual of Palestinian Aramaic Texts – Okay, this is one I tossed in for personal reasons. Lots of inscriptions in transcription and translation. I’ve been waiting almost a year for this one to break the barrier, so I’m begging some of you . . . Okay, that was kind of pathetic.

Logos is starting to get into digitizing important scholalry journals. The two journals below are known and used by specialists in the Hebrew Bible. Unless you have a university library database subscription, you can’t get these articles in PDF. Journals are where the most focused scholarship is, and these are gold for biblical studies.

The Journal of Biblical Literature (26 Vols.)

Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 1995–2007 (26 Issues)

One last thing. Some of these are so close that you may click through and the pre-pub will be history. Nothing I can do about that.

Technorati Tags: Gottingen Septuagint, Logos Bible software, pre-pub

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Tags: Gottingen Septuagint, Logos Bible software, pre-pub