Scholars
Jacob of Edessa
Jacob of Edessa was a Syriac scholar, monk and bishop of the second half of the seventh century, and the most learned figure of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the generations that…
Category
Scholars
Scholars
Richard Bentley’s Proposals for a New Testament
In the autumn of 1720 Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the most celebrated classical scholar in Europe, issued a short printed paper announcing a new edition of the Greek…
Scholars
Karl Lachmann
Karl Lachmann was a German philologist of the first half of the nineteenth century who worked with equal authority on Latin poetry, medieval German literature and the Greek New Testament. He is…
Scholars
Robert Lowth and the Discovery of Biblical Hebrew Poetry
Robert Lowth was an English scholar and churchman of the eighteenth century whose lectures on the poetry of the Hebrew Bible, delivered at Oxford in the 1740s and published in Latin in…
Scholars
Meiri’s Kiryat Sefer and the Laws of Writing a Torah Scroll
Among the many works of Menahem ben Solomon ha-Meiri, the Talmudist of Perpignan whose commentary on the Talmud has become one of the standard tools of rabbinic study, one short book is…
Scholars
Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon was born in Cordoba in 1138, the son of a judge who was still a refugee from the Almohad conquest of his city when the boy began to learn…
Hebrew
Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel and the Targumim of the Prophets and Writings
In the second-century days of Rabbi Yosi and his colleagues, so the Babylonian Talmud tells us, the sages of Yavneh wished to put the Book of Ecclesiastes into the canon and to…
Scholars
The Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Rewriting of the Patriarchs
The Genesis Apocryphon is one of the earliest and most curious of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It survives as a single parchment scroll, badly carbonised, badly fragmented, and almost illegible in places.…
Hebrew
The Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna
The text of the Hebrew Bible, as it now sits between the covers of a printed Mikraot Gedolot or a single-volume Hebrew Tanakh, looks deceptively clean. Page after page of square Aramaic…
Scholars
William Wickes and the Hebrew Accents
In the spring of 1881, at the Clarendon Press in Oxford, a small octavo volume appeared under the title A Treatise on the Accentuation of the Three So-called Poetical Books of the…
Scholars
Christian David Ginsburg
On a December day in 1897, in a reading room on Queen Victoria Street in London, a Christian scholar in his late sixties was checking the last proofs of the third volume…
Scholars
Alfred Moses and the Codex Sassoon
Alfred Henry Moses (born July 24, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American attorney, diplomat, and Jewish communal leader whose career encompasses corporate law, White House service under President Jimmy Carter, and…
Scholars
Moritz Steinschneider
Moritz Steinschneider (1816, 1907) was the kind of scholar who spent decades quietly building the scaffolding that later generations would stand on. A Moravian Jew who became the leading Hebrew bibliographer of…