The Making of Many Books (Review)

I just reviewed Stuart Weeks' impressive new book for Bulletin for Biblical Research. The review probably won't be published until the fall, so you'll have to wait until then for the full scoop. In the meantime, here's a small excerpt to whet your appetite for this latest contribution in the discussion on reception history.

Scholars and students of Ecclesiastes will undoubtedly be grateful for Weeks’ achievement of accumulating and organization of over 700 bibliographical entries. It is no small task to track down these resources and compile them in an accessible and usable format. Entries are organized in chronological order, and alphabetical order within a given publication year. Moreover, the addition of three indices (author, publisher, and passages) makes the volume especially useful and usable as a reference book. However, what makes The Making of Many Books especially valuable is that it accounts for more than just a database of ancient books on Ecclesiastes, although in some cases that was the only information Weeks had available to him. Overall, this volume goes beyond a basic cataloging of an annotated bibliography. Instead, Weeks shows how some works adapted previous works, how newer treatments creatively reinvented older treatments, and how errors—intentional and inadvertent—crept into later bibliographies and academic parlance.