Thursday, July 31, 2008

Plundering the Archive (dot org)

The IVP Electronic Reference collection has featured a couple of times recently on B2W. It is a fine collection ...

... but you can have a "reference collection" of a slightly older (OK, much older) vintage thanks to the quite amazing Archive.org. All of its massive resources are free for downloading. Sticking only to texts (the Jerry Garcia fans will want to visit the Grateful Dead collection, of course), here are a few items of biblical interest chosen almost at random to whet your appetite:
Texts and Language Reference

- 1906 printing of Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament

- 1898 printing of Gesenius, Kautzsch, Cowley, Hebrew Grammar

- Henry Barclay Swete, The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint, volumes 1, 2, and 3 (although you can find quite a bit of "Larger Cambridge Septuagint", too)

- might as well have Henry St. John Thackeray's A grammar of the Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint

Commentaries

- most (?) of the Keil and Delitzsch OT commentaries

- loads of the older International Critical Commentaries (OT and NT)

- J.C. Ryle's Expository Thoughts on Matthew and Mark.

Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics

- is not yet complete (only volumes 6 and 11 are missing), but here are the rest: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, and index.

There is much,
much more that this, of course. It is pretty overwhelming! But whatever your interests, I would be amazed if Archive.org didn't have something worthwhile for you. Kindle, it ain't! But do try the "Flip Book" view if you don't want to download the large hi-res PDF files. The "Flip Book" resolution is lower, but you can search, "flip" pages (doh!) and get a good feel for the text you're looking at before you decide to bother with a download.

If you find any particular treasures (and I didn't include everthing on my list for this post!), maybe you could note them in the comment thread.

Happy browsing!