Disability in the Hebrew Bible: new book

A new book, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences, by Saul M. Olyan, has been reviewed here.

via the site:

Description: Mental and physical disability, ubiquitous in texts of the Hebrew Bible, here receive their first thorough treatment. Olyan seeks to reconstruct the Hebrew Bible’s particular ideas of what is disabling and their potential social ramifications. Biblical representations of disability and biblical classification schemas – both explicit and implicit – are compared to those of the Hebrew Bible’s larger ancient West Asian cultural context, and to those of the later Jewish biblical interpreters who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study will help the reader gain a deeper and more subtle understanding of the ways in which biblical writers constructed hierarchically significant difference and privileged certain groups (e.g. persons with ‘whole’ bodies) over others (e.g. persons with physical ‘defects’). It also explores how ancient interpreters of the Hebrew Bible such as the Qumran sectarians reproduced and reconfigured earlier biblical notions of disability and earlier classification models for their own contexts and ends.

h/t NJCIM list serve

1599 Geneva Bible available for first time in almost 400 years

Used by the settlers in Jamestown, the Geneva Bible has great historical significance.

"It was the first English Bible fully translated from the original languages. It was the first study Bible; [it] has over 300,000 notes and cross references. It was the first Bible to use chapters and verse numbers," says Vallorani. "It was portable and inexpensive. And it was ... used by Shakespeare and John Bunyan, and influenced America and the founding of America as we know it today."

According to Vallorani, the Geneva Bible played a key role in the Reformation." Via onenewsnow.com