Among the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls that came into the hands of the antiquities market in 1947 and were acquired by the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel and by the…
A wooden reading lectern is set inside a limestone cave. An oil lamp flickers on a low stone ledge, throwing a circle of warm light across a long unfurled parchment that stretches…
There is a small, awkward truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls that the popular literature has smoothed over for half a century: the first one was not found at Qumran. The first…
Between the spring of 1516 and the early months of 1517, a Christian printer from Antwerp named Daniel Bomberg issued from his new workshop in the Frezzaria, a narrow street in the…
The two smallest and most famous pieces of scriptural antiquity in the world are rolled-up sheets of silver thinner than a kitchen foil. Each, when unrolled, fits inside the palm of an…
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.…
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem holds, in the Schottenstein collection of Jewish manuscripts on long-term deposit, an illuminated Hebrew Haggadah that is one of the most unusual survivals of medieval Jewish art.…
In May 2023 the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv announced the acquisition, by donation, of a Hebrew Bible manuscript that had been absent from public view for most…
In the upper room of a synagogue in Cairo, sometime in the late nineteenth century, an English traveller was shown an old Hebrew codex of unusual size. The codex was opened at…
The oldest translation of any part of the Hebrew Bible is the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Torah and the rest of the Jewish scriptures produced in the Hellenistic period. The…
The Aleppo Codex, in Hebrew Keter Aram Tsova, the Crown of Aleppo, was written, or more accurately completed, in the closing decades of the tenth century CE. The traditional scholarly window places…
The lowest town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, Tiberias, was, by the late seventh century of the Common Era, the only place in the world where the Hebrew…
The Damascus Pentateuch is one of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible codices to survive in something approaching its original form. It bears the shelfmark Codex Sassoon 507 and the manuscript identifier Ms.…
Inside the climate-controlled reserve stacks of the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the rue de Richelieu, on the shelf that runs along the south wall of the département des manuscrits orientaux, a…
Inside a climate-controlled vault of the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, on a tier of shelving not far from a folio of the Khitrovo Gospels and several folios of the…
The Hebrew Bible’s Masoretic text carries two parallel voices. One is the consonantal text that scribes copied, letter by letter, from generation to generation. The other is the Masorah, the marginal and…
A wooden reading lectern is set inside a limestone cave. An oil lamp flickers on a low stone ledge, throwing a circle of warm light across an open parchment. Above the lectern,…
A wooden reading lectern is set inside a limestone cave. An oil lamp flickers on a low stone ledge, throwing a circle of warm light across an open parchment. Above the lectern,…
For a reader trained on the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch is at once familiar and unsettling. The five books of Moses, the same sequence, the same stories from Genesis through Deuteronomy,…
For nearly half a century it carried a singular distinction: the oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Acquired in Egypt in 1902 and presented to Cambridge University Library the following year,…
On a January morning in 1897, in the Jewish quarter of Fustat — Old Cairo — a rabbi and a Cambridge scholar climbed a wooden ladder to a small opening in the…
Before 1914 there was no “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” There was not even a hyphen. There was, instead, a vast, interconnected Ottoman and post-Ottoman world stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Zagros, from…
King Josiah of Judah stands as one of the most compelling figures in biblical history, a monarch whose brief but intense reign represents a powerful testament to an individual’s capacity to seek…
The study of the Bible has always been an endeavor defined by the tools available to its interpreters. From the invention of the printing press to the creation of digital libraries, each…
