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“IN CONVERSATION WITH ODED LIPSCHITS” 3INTRODUCTIONDAVID S. VANDERHOOFT, GUEST EDITORBOSTON COLLEGEI am very pleased to serve as guest editor for this number of the Journalof Hebrew Scriptures. During the November, 2005 Annual Meeting of theSociety of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia, a book review paneloccupied one of the sessions of the “Literature and History of thePersian Period” group. The book under review was Oded Lipschits’sThe Fall and Rise of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake,Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005). The book represents a significant contributionto study not only of the Babylonian period, but also of the followingPersian era. At the suggestion of Professor Ehud Ben Zvi (University ofAlberta), the editor of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, the reviews arepresented here to a wider audience, and I thank him for his willingnessto publish them.Even before the book appeared in print, five eminent scholarsgraciously agreed to serve as panelists for the SBL session. They are, inthe order of their appearance in the session, Professor HughWilliamson (Oxford University), Professor Daniel Master (WheatonCollege, Wheaton, IL), Professor Rainer Albertz (Münster), ProfessorGary Knoppers (Pennsylvania State University), and Professor TamaraCohn Eskenazi (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,California). The response of Prof. Lipschits (Tel Aviv University) is alsoincluded below. All of these scholars are to be thanked for their originalwillingness to offer their reviews to the scholarly community just as thebook appeared in print, and again now in this edition of the Journal ofHebrew Scriptures. They are also especially to be congratulated for theircollegiality, incisiveness, and determination to make the SBL sessionboth a valuable exchange of ideas and a venue for meaningfulconversation. Jim Eisenbraun also deserves thanks for his willingness todistribute electronic versions of the book to the panelists before itsappearance in print.The peril in publishing such reviews as they were delivered istwofold: the remarks themselves were crafted for oral presentation toan audience that had not yet had the opportunity to engage the book.The reviews therefore tend to be rather more informal andconversational in tone than a normal book review. Second, the oralremarks presume, in a way the written ones cannot, a lively personalsetting in which the exchange of ideas is calibrated with a view tolooking one’s interlocutor in the eye. Nothing can be done to recreatethe latter setting. With respect to the informal aspect of the remarks, thepanelists took the opportunity to reshape their remarks slightly for