Customer Reviews

The SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies

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This easy-to-use, inexpensive volume is a must-own for all who write in the fields of biblical and ancient near eastern studies. College and seminary students, graduate students, teachers, and researchers will find this book a fine substitute for Turabian and/or the CMOS for all but the most obscure situations. The discipline-specific nature of the work also allows greater depth of coverage without making it overlong. Get it today, or be behind the standard tomorrow.

Although I teach a seminary course on research and bibliography, I hesitate to fully recommend this book. The book is eccentric in placing editors, translators and other random information within the same parentheses normally reserved for publication information in footnotes.
This eccentric practice is different from all other standard systems.
I would recommend the new edition of Turabian (2007) for footnote style.
Of course if you are writing for SBL publications you will have to use the eccentric SBL style. Other parts of the book giving correct forms for abbreviation, spelling and capitalization are useful for those specializing in biblical and theological studies.

This book must be on your shelf within easy reach if you are a graduate student of religion, a seminary student, or a scholar in the wide field of religion. Why? Because this book gives you the information you need to make your papers, articles, and books conform to the most used style in religious literature today--SBL.

In other words--student, when you see this on your recommended booklist for a religion class, buy it! It will help you make better grades! And, scholars, it will cut down editing time for submitting work for publication as well.

To put it colloquially, this book is the "Bible" of religious research!

As the premier North-American-based professional association of biblical scholars, the Society of Biblical Literature ('SBL') not only publishes the prestigious and tightly-edited Journal of Biblical Literature ('JBL'); its influence has a knock-on effect on other journals in this and ancillary fields.

Thus, the imperative of an authoritative 'SBL' style guide is obvious. Not so evident is how we lived without a full style guide for so many years until this superb collaborative project between SBL and Hendrickson Publishers emerged.

The editors have removed one of our last remaining excuses for sloppiness and inconsistency. I suppose we owe them our thanks ...

If you are studying Hebrew or Ancient Semitic languages you need this book for documentation and for dissertations. Excellent and a requirement for the Socity of Biblical Languages.

SBL Handbook of Style offers a uniform standard of all that scholarly authors and editors need to know about the technical dimensions of publishing activity. The book gives a detailed exposition of the rules and the whys and the wherefores of this business, from commas and hyphens to abbreviations, from transliterations to forms of annotation.