"Second-Hand Knowledge of Second Temple Jewish Scholarship" or "How the Scholarship of Women Gets Left Behind" - A Thread 1/

There is an interesting post over on the Logos Academic Blog by a PhD Student in Old Testament about the apotropaic use of scripture to exorcise demons. 2/ https://academic.logos.com/demons-dss-and-jesus-psalm-91-and-the-need-for-text-critical-pastors/

Part way through the article the author makes this interesting claim: “The two main views of how [Second Temple/DSS] apotropaism was conducted are described in the works of David Lincicum & Menahem Kister." 3/

Having done some work on the apotropaic use of scripture against "transmundane forces" (H/T @AnnetteYReed), I was struck by the claim these supposed two views were limited to David Lincicum and Menahem Kister, both of whom I respect. 4/

Curious to what literature I had missed, I clicked on the footnote which led me to a postgraduate journal article from TCD in 2014: Michael Morris, “’Apotropaic’ Tactics in the Matthean Temptation,” Journal of Postgraduate Research, Trinity College Dublin, 2014, 137-138. 5/

You can find that article here: http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/73637/“Apotropaic”%20Tactics%20in%20the%20Matthean%20Temptation.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1 6/

The author of this particular Logos Academic blog had clearly made his claim based on reading Morris's article. Sure enough, when I went to the referenced pages, David Lincicum's 2008 article was mentioned along with Menahem Kister's 1999 chapter. 7/

There was another scholar whose work was mentioned a page later in Morris's 2014 article, and that was the work of Esther Eshel. This is what surprised me about the original Logos Academic blog post. I had expected to see Eshel's name there. But it wasn't. 8/

Eshel's work on genre classification among incantation texts pre-dates Lincicum's article by 5 years (2003). I was also struck by the fact that in the Logos blog, the author also did not state the work of Bilhah Nitzan whose work pre-dated both Lincicum and Kister (1994!). 9/

I suspect that for the sake of the blog, the author did not venture much beyond Michael Morris's 2014 article, and assumed that Lincicum and Kister were both substantial "views." Unaware of the wider work, he left out two *very* senior female scholars who work on Scrolls. 10/

This is perhaps an honest mistake. But it is to me indicative of how people whose primary field is not second temple Judaism, and especially not the Scrolls, are sometimes very unaware of the huge amount of scholarship out there, especially being done by women. 11/

If you decide to do work on the Scrolls or STJ then please read beyond one or two articles summarising a "view"! If you rely on second hand knowledge, you're going to miss out on a lot of great scholarship. /end