The title of Stefan Timm's book on ‘Eusebius and Holy Scripture’ can easily mislead. For the real focus and subject matter of the book are stated in its subtitle. What Timm offers is a close and detailed textual analysis of the precise forms of the proper names of the places which Eusebius included in his Onomasticon or gazetteer of biblical place names. Hence there is no discussion whatever of how Eusebius interpreted the Bible or of the use that he made of the Bible in any of his voluminous other works. Moreover, Timm has postponed to a future volume any discussion of the evidence in the Onomasticon for Eusebius’ contemporary world, so that, for example, he makes but one solitary reference, and that in passing in his discussion of Nazareth (p. 527), to the city called Legio, which was refounded as Maximianopolis between 293 and 305 (T. D. Barnes, ‘Eusebius and Legio’, Scripta Classica Israelica xxvii [2008], 59–66).

Timm's general conclusion is sensible and undoubtedly correct. He finds that, although it is impossible to determine whether the lemmata for place names in the New Testament follow a particular text tradition, the lemmata for place names in the Old Testament almost always follow the text tradition of Origen. The contrary would have surprised. But it will surely be valuable for students of both the Hebrew and the Greek text of the Old Testament to have at their fingertips the material assembled by Timm, especially since he very frequently has occasion to correct the standard edition of the Onomasticon by Eric Klostermann (Eusebius Werke 3.1, GCS 11.1 [Leipzig 1904]), which is now to be supplemented by fragments of the Syriac version re-edited by Timm in Das Onomastikon der biblischen Ortsnamen: Edition der syrischen Fassung mit griechischem Text, englischer und deutscher Übersetzung: Eingeleitet, herausgegeben und mit Indices versehen (Berlin–New York 2005). He begins with the book of Joshua in order to illustrate the problems (pp. 5–40), then proceeds methodically and in great detail through the rest of the Pentateuch, Judges, the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings and the prophetical books (pp. 41–503) before turning to the New Testament (pp. 504–32). Timm also provides a comprehensive bibliography and almost one hundred pages of indices.