Grove City College junior Johnny Adkins ’26 received second place in the “Outstanding Paper Award” category at the Northeast Ohio Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference earlier this month at Kent State University.
His winning paper “‘There is No Place to Burn Offerings Before You': Diaspora Jews and the Apocryphal Additions to the Book of Daniel” explores what textual additions to the book of Daniel in the Septuagint – the Greek tradition of the Old Testament translated in the 2nd Century BCE – reveal about Jewish life outside Palestine during that era.
“These additions, namely the prayers of Daniel's friends in the fire and the stories of "Susanna" and "Bel and the Dragon", which are excluded from the Protestant Canon but are included in the Catholic one, can inform us about developing notions of Jewish religious and communal practices outside of Judea and the formation of their identity as a people group,” Adkins said.
Adkins is a History major from Morgantown, Pa.
His paper won amidst submissions from students from Slippery Rock University, Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio University, Geneva College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Ohio Northern University, and Kent State University.
Phi Alpha Theta is an honor society for undergraduate and graduate students and professors of history.