Dropsie College's Jewish Apocryphal Literature series

I recently picked up a couple of volumes in the Dropsie College Jewish Apocryphal Literature series, published by Harper in the 1950s. These books do not get much attention these days, having been superseded by more recent scholarship. That's a shame. The books are laid out like the Loeb Classical Library, with Greek on the left side and English on the right, only these are Octavo size and therefore more attractive and easier to read. I'm not aware of more recent commentaries including a full reproduction of the Greek text, so these volumes are well worth tracking down.

The series was ushered in with the announcement in May, 1950, that a 30-volume series, beginning with Sidney Tedesche's The First Book of Maccabees, would seek to translate the major Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha over the next ten years. I guess the sales weren't good enough for a commercial publisher like Harper to fulfill this ambitious idea, and only a few volumes actually saw the light of day.

Tedesche. The First Book of Maccabees (1950)
Hadas. Aristeas to Philostratus (Letter of Aristeas) (1951)
Hadas. The Third and Fourth Book of Maccabees (1953)
Tedesche. The Second Book of Maccabees (1954)
Reider. The Book of Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon) (1957).
Zimmerman. The Book of Tobit (1958)

Fourteen years passed before the final volume in the series was published: Enslin's The Book of Judith (1972). The publisher this time was Brill. It is announced as "Volume VII" of the series facing the title page. All of the books are pretty hard to find in good condition, but this volume especially so.

Hadas's Aristeas to Philostratus was reprinted by Wipf & Stock 2007.

Andrew Brown