Preface: The New Cambridge History of the Bible

More than forty years after the publication of The Cambridge History of the Bible (CHB) the time has come to revisit the entire field of biblical studies, and provide the contemporary reader with new guidance to the ‘state of the art’ in the study of the Old and New Testaments and the history of their reception from Antiquity to the present day. The period since the publication of the first and the second volume of the History - the latter of which contains, due to a change in the plan of publication, material covering some of the same ground as volume 1, and material relevant to volume 1 - under the editorship of P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, and G. W. H. Lampe, has witnessed a considerable number of discoveries of texts and artefacts relevant to the study of the Old and New Testaments and an often remarkable shift in scholarly methodology and opinion. Whereas the four chapters devoted to the Old Testament in the first volume of CHB concentrate on the formation of the Old Testament, questions of canonicity and non-canonicity, the history of the Hebrew text and early Old Testament exegesis, the present volume mirrors the increasing specialisation of Old Testament studies (in the widest sense, i.e. including both the Hebrew and the Greek Bibles, and other witnesses) and the rich research activity that has unfolded over the last four decades, especially in areas such as Pentateuch theory, Septuagint scholarship and Qumran studies. Therefore, while the editors have reproduced the basic structure of the first volume of the CHB, they have thought it necessary considerably to increase the number of chapters in the present volume.