Scripture
Abisha Scroll of Nablus
The Samaritans, a small community living at Nablus and on Mount Gerizim in the central hills of the land of Israel, possess a number of ancient Torah scrolls written in their own…
Category
Scripture
Scripture
Tefillin and Mezuzot from Qumran
Among the many thousands of fragments recovered from the caves near Khirbet Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea are some of the smallest written objects to survive from ancient…
Scripture
Rashi and His Commentary on the Torah
Two objects carry the name of Rashi into the modern world. The first is a person: Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, born in Troyes in Champagne around February 1040 and buried there in July…
Scripture
The Muratorian Fragment
The Muratorian Fragment is a short Latin document, eighty-five lines long, that lists the books of the New Testament accepted by its author’s church and comments briefly on each. It survives in…
Scripture
Codex Rossanensis
In the Museo Diocesano e del Codex at Rossano, in Calabria, behind glass kept at a strict temperature, lies a book that most visitors read past: a square volume of parchment the…
Scripture
The Book of Kells
Put your eye close to the glass and the most famous manuscript in the world turns out to be a book. The Chi Rho page of the Book of Kells, folio 34r,…
Scripture
Codex Alexandrinus
On New Year’s Day 1627 a Greek Bible was carried into the presence of King Charles I and handed over by a man who had travelled thousands of miles to give it…
Scripture
Bezalel and the Ark of the Covenant
The specifications for the sanctuary in Exodus read like a contract drafted by someone who expected it to be audited. They give the length of the Ark in cubits and half cubits,…
Scripture
The Scrolls of Augsburg
Inside the synagogue on Halderstrasse in Augsburg, in the small hours of 10 November 1938, the caretaker was made to unlock his own front door. Twenty or thirty men pushed past him,…
Scripture
The Habakkuk Scroll
Lying open along its whole length in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a scroll a little under a metre and a half long, and the eye has to travel sideways across…
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…
Scripture
The Aleppo Codex
Inside the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, in a sealed chamber kept at a constant temperature, rests a book with no beginning. Two thirds of it survive. The Pentateuch is gone,…
Scripture
The Kennicott Bible
On Wednesday, the twenty-fourth day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 5236, corresponding in the Julian calendar to 24 July 1476, two Jewish artisans put the finishing touches on…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos and the Birth of Aramaic Scripture
Few documents of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic periods have been more continuously used than the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that Jewish tradition calls Targum Onkelos. It is the…
Scripture
Saadya Gaon and the Birth of Masoretic Scholarship
In October 942, in a town called Suf on the left bank of the Tigris, perhaps a few days ride north of Baghdad, a Jewish scholar of about sixty died. His name…
Scripture
The Mishmarot And The Priestly Courses
The Mishmarot are the twenty-four priestly courses into which the Aaronide priesthood of ancient Israel was divided for the purpose of rotating the temple service, and the calendars and lists of the…
Scripture
The Tel Dan Stele
In July 1993, an archaeologist named Gila Cook, working on the long running excavation of Tel Dan in northern Israel, brushed the dirt from a black basalt fragment that had been reused…
Scripture
The Codex Assemani 66 and the Halakhic Midrashim
The oldest large page of rabbinic literature in Europe is not on a Jewish bookshelf. It sits in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, under the catalogue number Vat. ebr. 66, in a plain…
Scripture
The Masorah Finalis and the Closing Apparatus of the Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible that Jews read in synagogue and that scholars consult as the received text of the Old Testament has been transmitted through more than a thousand years in a form…
Scripture
The Codex Amiatinus
Of the great pandects copied by the early medieval monasteries of Latin Christendom, only one is, in a real sense, still alive on a public library shelf. It is the codex now…
Scripture
The Lachish Letters and the Last Days of the Kingdom of Judah
Among the small corpus of Hebrew inscriptions from the period of the divided monarchy, the eighteen ostraca known as the Lachish Letters occupy a place of unique importance. Found in the ruins…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos And The Aramaic Pentateuch Tradition
Long before the Hebrew text received its Tiberian pointing, and before the Masoretes fixed its consonants in the canonical line we now read, Jewish communities in the land of Israel and the…
Scripture
The War Scroll from Qumran
Of the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from the caves above the Wadi Qumran in 1947, the most unusual is the manuscript that scholars now call the War Scroll, and that…
Scripture
The Elephantine Papyri and the Jewish Colony at Elephantine
In 1893 a young American collector named Charles Edwin Wilbour stood in the antiquities market at the southern Egyptian town of Aswan and bought a sheaf of brittle brown sheets of papyrus…