T'was rejected

Sadly my Levitical Cities paper was rejected once again from the first journal it was sent to. To recap, I first sent it during winter of last year. It was summarily rejected but I was given the option of improving it and sending it in again. It took an entire year, but I finally managed to send it in a little over a month ago.

But it has now been rejected once again. Still, largely it went better than last time. Last time it was rejected on the doorstep by the editor. This time it was at least passed along to peer reviewers, so I received a copy of their reviews. Probably mistakenly the editor also passed along a slightly corrected copy of the paper which showed who one of the reviewers was. I always blow out some air with a "pssshh" when I recognize a name. And yes, I recognized the name of the reviewer. He actually complemented me, despite thinking that the paper wasn't a good fit for that particular journal. He thought it should be sent to a different journal, which is a very nice and cool thing to hear from a much, much more experienced scholar.

The other review was more to the point, critiquing my discussion and dating (or perhaps lack thereof) of the lists of Levitical Cities, as well as my choice of examining only the cities of one particular tribe. His criticism was much sharper, but I must admit, it didn't really hurt given that he opened the review by stating what is, in my opinion, a too-wacky hypothesis for the dating of the lists. Something like Wellhausen on steriods. I won't divulge too much right now, both for this person's privacy (though I don't know who he is) and because, as I've said in the past, I'll give a proper description of the theory when it's published.

Now I suppose I'll move on to the next journal, a more lower-tier journal. There just aren't that many options for Hebrew language humanities papers in Israel, which is quite a downer.