Conversations with the Biblical World

Guidelines for Contributors

Updated 25 July 2019

1. To be considered for publication in the annual issue of Conversations with the Biblical World (CBW), a paper must have been delivered that year at an annual meeting (regional or national) of one of the sponsoring societies (i.e., EGLBS, Midwest SBL, Pacific Northwest SBL) or related professional associations (CBA, SBL, or ASOR).
2. Submissions are due by July 1 of the year in which you made the presentation, unless your presentation was made after June 1. In that case, it must be submitted by December 1 to be considered for the following year's issue of the journal. If your presentation has been accepted for a meeting in July or August (e.g., at the CBA general meeting) and you would prefer to have it published in the year of the actual presentation, you are welcome make an advance submission. Just mention that detail in your cover letter.
3. Submissions should be entered through the online system hosted at the CBW website, cbw-journal.org. (Click here for the direct link.) If you have any questions, contact the General Editor by emailing conversations@conversations-with-the-biblical-world.com.
4. Each submission should include six separate documents, seven if the presentation won a regional award or paper prize. Each document should be named according to the following convention: PresentationYear.Date.Meeting.DocumentType.AuthorSurname.pdf. Modify each component to represent the accurate data for your submission. All files except the first one should be in PDF format.
   1. A DOCX file of the essay, headed by the title, without the author's name or any other identifying data. This document type is essay.
   2. A PDF copy of the identical essay, only with the author's name and contact information on the title page. This document type also is essay.
   3. An abstract of 100-150 words, with the essay title, and followed by the author's name, mailing address (institution, city, state/province, postal code, and country), and email address. This document type is Abstract.
   4. A brief statement (~75 words) identifying the author's name, current institutional affiliation (if any), and position title. It may also include publication information on the author's most recent book or other significant scholarly contribution. This document type is Bio.
   5. A cover letter indicating the date the paper was presented (including which society and at what venue) and certifying that the article is not being submitted simultaneously to some other journal. If the essay won some sort of prize at the regional meeting, so indicate. This document type is Cover.
   6. The copyright assignment form granting CBW publication rights in your essay. Create your customized form by going to https://sites.google.com/conversations-with-the-biblical-world.com/cbw/cbw-copyright-assignment. This document type is CAF.
   7. If the essay won some sort of prize at the meeting where you presented it, include a document that verifies this fact and indicates the nature of the prize. This document type is Award.
5. Page numbers following the form “Page X of Y” should appear on the bottom center of each page of the manuscript. No other header or footer information should appear.
6. If section headings are used within the essay, they should be preceded and followed by an extra blank line. Take care to follow a consistent hierarchy if using multiple levels of headings. DO NOT use automatic numbering systems in your word processor; these get garbled and lost in the editing process.
7. Use the "style" settings rather than individually formatting paragraphs, footnotes, and so forth. (E.g., do not use tabs to indent the opening line of a paragraph.)
8. Footnotes, not endnotes, should be used throughout the essay.
   1. Each footnote must begin on the page that references it. A long note may carry over to the following page(s).
   2. Use a footnote style that superscripts both the footnote reference numbers in the text and the anchor numbers in the footnotes themselves.
   3. Do not add extra manual line breaks between the footnotes.
   4. If you are using a bibliographic database to manage your references, paste the bibliographic information without the links. Also, make sure you have the correct the format for footnotes rather than leaving the citation in bibliographic format.
9. Check that your references are complete, including:
   1. The full series title, volume number, and series editor for a work in a series;
   2. The page(s) you are citing;
   3. If you are citing an essay in a collected volume, also provide the inclusive page numbers for the full essay in that collection;
   4. Full names, not initials, for authors and editors; and
   5. Full titles, not abbreviations, for any non-biblical primary text, journal, commentary series, dictionary, encyclopedia, or other non-biblical work cited, even if you think the abbreviation a matter of common knowledge. E.g., do not use merely the translator's surname and LCL to refer to a volume in the Loeb Classical Library; include a full citation for that volume.
   6. NEVER use “op. cit.,” “ibid.,” or “idem” to refer to a previously-mentioned work or author, use an abbreviated citation that includes the author's surname, short title for the work, and the page number(s) you are referencing.
10. For details not specified in these style guidelines, the SBL Handbook of Style should be followed. For questions that are not addressed by the Handbook, consult the Chicago Manual of Style on humanities-style citations. NB:
    1. CMoS provides different options for how to cite an essay that appears in an edited volume. CBW uses the following format: Author'sFullName, "Essay Title," full- page-range-of-essay in Editor'sFullName, ed., BookTitle (City: Publisher, Year), page-of-reference. For example:
       • Amelie Kuhrt, "Non-Royal Women in the Late Babylonian Period," 215-39 in Barbara S. Lesko, ed., Women's Earliest Records: From Ancient Egypt and Western Asia. Proceedings of the Conference on Women in the Ancient Near East, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, November 5-7, 1987; Brown Judaic Studies 166 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 225.
    2. As in the example just provided, series titles and volume numbers should appear after the volume title, preceded by a semi-colon, and then followed by the parentheses and publication information. The number of the particular volume you are citing should always follow the series title. If the series does not use volume numbers, use "nv" in square brackets to indicate this. For example:
       • Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians; New Interpreter's Commentary on the New Testament [nv] (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
11. Take care to follow the current standards for citing biblical texts:
    1. Use the abbreviation for a biblical book only when followed by a specific chapter and/or verse citation; otherwise the complete title of the book should be provided (e.g., Genesis, but Gen 2).
    2. Abbreviations of biblical books do not take periods (e.g., Gen 2 not Gen. 2).
    3. When citing a biblical passage, use a non-breaking space between the book title and the chapter number (e.g., Gen 2:3). Likewise, if the biblical book has more than one part, use a non-breaking space between the number and the book title (e.g., 2 Kings). If you are citing chapter and verse, rather than the entire book, omit the space between the book number and abbreviated title (e.g., 2Kgs 6:12).
    4. The en-dash (–), not a hyphen (-) is used to indicate consecutive chapters in a book, consecutive verses in a scriptural text, consecutive page numbers in the secondary literature, consecutive years in a date, etc.
12. Use a 12-point Times New Roman font throughout the essay (in the body, footnotes, etc.), except for non-Roman-alphabet foreign-language terms.
    1. Hebrew or Greek terms should be transliterated or rendered in the respective SBL Unicode fonts, freely available at http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts.aspx.
    2. Typically, other non-Roman-alphabet terms should be transliterated. Consult the General Editor if you have specific concerns in this regard.
13. Other common style mistakes to be avoided:
    1. Use an author's full name at first mention in the body of the text. Thereafter, the surname alone can be used. Never use an author's given name to reference the individual's work.
    2. Follow a period or other ending punctuation mark with a single (not double) space.
    3. Dates AD/CE follow the abbreviation for the era; dates BCE/BC precede the abbreviation (e.g., 6 BCE but CE 6).
    4. Avoid intervening periods for AD/CE, BC/BCE, ANE, or AM/PM.
14. Customarily, papers must be limited to 7500 words (including notes and abstract). The presidential address and invited papers may extend to 10,000 words.
15. Submissions undergo blind review by members of the CBW editorial board. A submission may be accepted or rejected as is, or the author may be asked to make editorial changes to the text and resubmit the essay. If an essay is not resubmitted within six weeks of the requested changes, the author forfeits the opportunity to publish it in CBW.
16. If an essay passes editorial review and is accepted for publication, the author is to resubmit it as an MS Word DOCX file in which all the editorial suggestions have been incorporated. The final submission should conform to the foregoing style instructions except #4: it should have NO headers, footers, or page numbers. The naming convention for that file is: PresentationYear.PresentationDate.Meeting.Essay-Final.Author Surname.docx

Other Important Notes

1. When submitting an essay for publication in CBW, the author is asked to submit an "assignment of copyright" form conveying to the journal copyright for the prospective publication. For three years after the essay is printed, it should be embargoed and not published in another form, whether print or digital. After the embargo period, an author may be granted permission to reuse the essay or a portion of it by writing to the CBW Managing Editor with the details of the potential publication. Traditionally, CBW allows the author to reuse or reprint the essay free of charge at any point after the embargo period.
2. The journal typically is printed in grey scale. Any author who deems color to be essential to convey the content of a particular essay may request special handling, but the author may be asked to bear any extra expense incurred for producing the color copy.
3. Upon publication, authors will receive a PDF offprint of their published essays. Anyone who wishes to obtain a print edition of the full volume can request one through the subscription form available through the CBW website.
4. CBW essays are available in full-text form through the AtlaSerials (ATLAS) database, and are abstracted in Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts. Issues before 2012 also were abstracted in Elenchus Bibliographicus.
5. CBW has subscribers across five continents. Become one of them by completing the online subscription form!