The publisher is giving away a free copy of the revised edition of the Zondervan Atlas of the Bible, by Carl Rasmussen, drawing a name from the list of those who comment on what biblical place they would most like to visit.  Current entries include the Sea of Galilee, Jericho, Philippi, the Areopagus, and Syracuse.  If you’re interested, you can throw your name in the hat.

I received a pre-press copy of the atlas a few days ago and look forward to recommending it to one and all in the near future.  It’s only $26 at Amazon with a Pre-order Price Guarantee.

I’m a couple of weeks behind on this one, but if you haven’t already read this review of Geza Vermes’s The Story of the Scrolls in the Jerusalem Report, you may enjoy it.

One Sunday morning in 1948, a Jewish-born Hungarian student at the Fathers of Notre Dame de Sion Catholic order’s seminary in Louvain watched as his professor in class held up a photograph of Chapter 40 from the Book of Isaiah. The young seminarian’s curiosity was instantly piqued: the photograph was of a 2,000-year-old manuscript fragment from a cache discovered a year before by Bedouin shepherds in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea.
“Staring at it, I became captivated,” Geza Vermes told The Jerusalem Report by phone from his home in Oxford, England, where he is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Wolfson College. “With youthful zeal I vowed to solve the greatest Hebrew manuscript discovery of all time. Ever since, the scrolls and my life have been intertwined.”
Six decades on, Vermes clearly remains captivated by the ancient documents unearthed in the Judean desert. At the slightest prodding he declaims at length on them with undiminished enthusiasm. And while the world’s leading authority on the historic manuscripts may not wear his love of the scrolls on his sleeve, he does often wear it on his tie. Emblazoned on a custom-made necktie that Vermes, an owlish man with old-world charm, wears for his public lectures are fragments of the Community Rule, a sectarian document recovered from Cave 4 at Qumran, which the Oxford professor personally worked on deciphering.

The review article continues here.  The book is available from Amazon for $10-12.

HT: Joe Lauer

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association has just announced the 2010 Christian Book Awards, and two of the winners are related to Bible geography!  Both of these works made my “Best of 2009” list.

The Bible of the Year is Glo, published by Immersion Digital and Zondervan.  More than half of the photographs in this multimedia Bible are from the collection of BiblePlaces.com.  (For previous posts on Glo, see here and here.)

The Bible Reference and Study award goes to Barry Beitzel, The New Moody Atlas of the Bible. 

Congratulations to the creators of these excellent resources!