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BOOK REVIEWS 323 and depend upon divine assistance for these as for other, higher goods. A reader may be satisfied that he does not exhibit the crass desire for excess illustrated by characters from the film Wall Street. Upon reading DeYoung on avarice, however, that same reader might discover in himself a disposition to harbor the worldly hope of finding security in a career or the status afforded even by relatively modest means, and thus identify the very vice illustrated in this chapter. It is worth noting that although DeYoung is a philosopher by profession, she does not limit her consideration of the vices to an account of the human good attainable through natural capacities alone. Her work is more properly theological than philosophical, and aptly incorporates the Christian account of the work and effect of divine grace in remedying the vices opposed to the virtues by which man is capable of enjoying supernatural beatitude. She does not take a stand in this work on the existing debates concerning the relationship between man’s natural and supernatural ends, nor on the prospect of the intelligibility of an account of virtue, and here an account of vice, separated from Christian faith holding to the truth of revelation. Such a consideration of the vices from a purely philosophical perspective—how particular habitual dispositions may be understood as contrary to the genuine human good considered apart from any revealed truths—might be a worthwhile exercise. Or it might be an exercise in futility. Raising and resolving this question, however, is markedly neither the point nor the achievement of this book. Rather,the achievement of this book is the solid and straightforward recovery of the tradition of teaching about the vices as an essential but regrettably overlooked element of virtue theory today. The fact that DeYoung’s illustrations are so illuminating, and that the language of the vices remains so foreign and unfamiliar to popular and specialist audiences alike, is proof that this recovery is not complete. DeYoung’s work is a welcome reminder of the importance of the vices for any genuine virtue theory, and an effective starting-point for a more rigorous and systematic integration of the vices into virtue theory today. ROBERT BARRY Providence College Providence, Rhode Island Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Edited by MAGNE SÆBØ. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Pp. 1248. $245.00 (cloth).ISBN:978-3525 -53982-8. BOOK REVIEWS 324 This large tome is the third in a projected series of five books on the history of the interpretation of the Old Testament. Known as the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament project (HBOT), the series is edited by Magne Sæbø, a senior Norwegian Old Testament scholar. After briefly describing the history of the HBOT and raising some questions about its methodology, this review will give an overview of the series and concentrate on those chapters published so far that will be of particular interest to readers of The Thomist. In 1869 Ludwig Diestel of the University of Jena published a history of the interpretation of the Old Testament under the title Geschichte des Alten Testamentes in der christlichen Kirche. Diestel’s monumental work, over eight hundred pages long, focused solely on the Old Testament rather than on the Bible as a whole. Diestel expressed regret that he was not able to include Jewish interpretation in his purview. A similar but significantly larger project was published in the 1980s, this time in French and under Catholic auspices. Eight volumes of Bible de tous les temps (BTLT), edited by Charles Kannengiesser, appeared between 1984 and 1989. Unlike Diestel’s volume, this series treated both the Old and New Testaments, and included Jewish and Christian interpretation. Magne Sæbø’s HBOT project was initiated in the late 1970s, and at first was intended as a updating of Diestel, extending his work to the contemporary period. In the early 1980s Sæbø enlarged the scope of the project and enlisted the help of Jewish (Menahem Haran) and Catholic (Henri Cazelles, Chris Brekelmans) co-editors. For the volume under review a new set of coeditors, Michael Fishbane (Chicago) and...

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