After four and a half years in Erlangen, Germany working in the Institute for Old Testament there and finishing my dissertation, I have moved to Wuppertal, Germany. Here, I’ll be working for Prof. Kreuzer in Wuppertal and for Prof. Schart in Essen, working on research projects and composing proposals for stipends to pay for the expansions of these research projects.

I’m pretty excited about the new opportunities here, although I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t finished my PhD yet. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to move here before everything in Erlangen was finalized, meaning that I get to pay the 120 Euro to go back in April or May to take my oral exams. No need to complain about it, I just wish that I had been able to finish that off and start off here with a clean slate.

At any rate, I have spent the last week getting to know the material for the research that we are undertaking here, as well as aquainting myself with the environs. Both of the professors here are really interested in supporting me thus far and have really gone out of their ways to make sure that everything gets moving. That makes the research that much more appealing, but I’m really excited about it simply because the subjects are huge, detailed, and currently hot spots in the world of academia.

At the present, I have been doing some correcting work and assisting in the composition of the indices for Explanatory Volume of LXX.D (Septuaginta Deutsch), spending my afternoons looking up the various names of the Qumran texts and the various papyri that LXX.D references in its discusions of the various attestations of Greek forms or their Hebrew equivalents. Since the new volume has more than 3000 pages, it’s pretty tedious work, but I think that I have done a good job and will hopefully have helped scholars look up the materials that they seek.

On the other hand, I have been doing some research to get ready for a conference called “Torah in the Book of Numbers” that will be taking place on April 12-13, 2011 in Bochum, Germany. I’m trying to catch up on the newest and the classical positions on the Book of Numbers and the development of the Pentateuch/Torah. Since the people coming to present at this conference are great international scholars, I’m really looking forward to it. The singular problem is that there is way too much material to cover by then, that I could never ever possibly read it all. Write now I am working my way through the materials of Joel S. Baden, whose work I don’t know at all. He has some interesting positions, and I’m really looking forward to how he develops his thesis.

Eventually I hope to get some more research done on my next planned project: the Dodekapropheton (The Twelve Minor Prophets). However, if I start to love all of the research in the Pentateuch, I may find it hard to get back out of it. We’ll just have to see how it develops…