Books
The Rabbula Gospels of 586
The Rabbula Gospels is a Syriac manuscript of the four Gospels completed in 586 at a monastery in northern Syria or Mesopotamia and now kept in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence…
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Books
The Alba Bible and Moses Arragel’s Castilian Translation
The Alba Bible is a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible translated into Castilian, made between 1422 and 1430 by Rabbi Moses Arragel of Guadalajara for Don Luis de Guzmán, Master of the…
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The Bible Moralisée and the Picture Bibles of Capetian France
The Bible moralisée, or moralised Bible, is a type of illustrated Bible created in Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century, in the circle of the Capetian kings of France.…
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The Ashburnham Pentateuch and Early Illustrated Latin Bibles
The Ashburnham Pentateuch is a Latin manuscript of the first books of the Bible, written and painted in the late sixth or early seventh century and now preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale…
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The Lisbon Bible and the Portuguese School of Hebrew Illumination
The Lisbon Bible is a Hebrew Bible in three volumes, completed in Lisbon in 1482 and now preserved in the British Library in London. It contains the complete text of the Hebrew…
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The Farhi Bible and Elisha Cresques of Majorca
Among the illuminated Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, few combine as much learning, ornament and personal testimony as the codex known today as the Farhi Bible. It was written and decorated…
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The Cervera Bible of 1300
In the summer of 1299 a professional Hebrew scribe named Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan broke his leg in a small town called Cervera. Unable to travel, he accepted a commission from…
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The Yemenite Taj and the Tiberian Text in Yemen
Among the Jews of Yemen the most valued book in a household or a synagogue was the Taj, a codex of the Pentateuch written with its vowels and accents, its Masoretic notes…
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Biblia Hebraica Quinta: The Fifth Edition of the Hebrew Bible
Open almost any scholarly commentary on the Old Testament written in the last century and the Hebrew it discusses comes, directly or indirectly, from one family of books: the Biblia Hebraica published…
Books
A Manuscript in Two Museums
On a winter afternoon in 2023, in Gallery 503 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, the second volume of a 15th-century Hebrew manuscript rests open on a low wooden…
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Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex
Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible was published by Algonquin Books in May 2012 and won the Jewish Book Council’s…
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Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
The third edition of Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, published in 2012 by Fortress Press, is the standard textbook on the subject, and a 2026 reader who wants a…
Books
The Crucible of the Modern Age
Documenting the history of the Middle East requires more than just a mastery of dates and treaties; it demands an architectural understanding of how deeply rooted cultural, religious, and geopolitical fault lines…
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The Book of Books
The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611–2011 by Melvyn Bragg is an elegant, passionate, and highly readable tribute to one of the most influential texts in…
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Lewis Glinert and The Story of Hebrew
The study of language history often suffers from a linear bias, presenting the evolution of a tongue as a series of inevitable developments culminating in its modern form. In the volume entitled…