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RR 2012/206 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible Editor in chief Michael D. Coogan Oxford University Press Oxford 2011 ISBN 978 0 19 975541 7 URL: www.oxford-booksofthebible.com/ Last visited February 2012 Contact publisher for pricing information Also available as a two volume printed set (ISBN 978 0 19 537737 8; £265 $395)
Keywords Christianity, Encyclopaedias
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121211240459
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible is published both as a two-volume print work and also made available digitally through Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf. This review concentrates on the online version.
Books of the Bible is the first in a series of specialized reference works, each addressing a specific subfield within biblical studies. The series aims to produce high-level scholarly reference works that are both accessible and also in-depth in their content, going beyond the basics to provide more specialised coverage. Oxford University Press is working on this new multivolume reference work on the Bible that would present both older and current interpretive strategies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible is part of this larger project, The Oxford Encyclopedias of the Bible, which will see the production of several two-volume sets, each with a specific focus, such as the Bible and theology, the Bible and law, the Bible and ethics, the Bible and the arts, the Bible and archaeology, and the Bible and gender studies.
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible aims to provide a single source for authoritative reference overviews of scholarship on some of the most important topics of study in the field of biblical studies. The Encyclopedia contains almost 120 scholarly entries, ranging in length from 500 to 10,000 words, on each of the canonical books of the Bible, major apocryphal books of the New and Old Testaments, important non-canonical texts, and thematic essays on topics such as canonicity, textual criticism, and translation.
There are over 100 contributors, mostly from North America and the UK, with a smattering from Europe and Israel and one or two contributors from Africa. The articles are arranged alphabetically by the title of the book about which they are written but this can lead to some confusion unless studied carefully. For example, the numeric labels of...