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Codex Climaci Rescriptus
Codex Climaci Rescriptus is a palimpsest, a manuscript whose original writing was scraped away so that the parchment could be used again. Its upper and later text, written in Syriac around the…
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Codex Marchalianus and the Greek Prophets
Codex Marchalianus is a Greek manuscript of the Prophets written in Egypt in the sixth century and now kept in the Vatican Library under the shelfmark Vat. gr. 2125.12 It contains the…
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Wadi Murabbaat Biblical Scrolls
About eighteen kilometres south of Qumran, a steep gorge known in Arabic as Wadi Murabbaʿat and in Hebrew as Nahal Darga cuts through the Judaean Desert towards the Dead Sea. In the…
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The Silver Scroll
In 1979, excavating a tomb in a cave on the western slope of the City of David, the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay uncovered two small objects that were, at first, easy to overlook:…
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The Lord’s Prayer in the Manuscripts
Almost every Christian who says the Lord’s Prayer knows that the New Testament records it twice, once in Matthew and once in Luke, and most have heard that the two versions are…
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Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla
The Syro-Hexapla is a translation of the Greek Old Testament into Syriac, made in Egypt in the second decade of the seventh century by Paul, bishop of Tella, and a small group…
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Guyart des Moulins and the Bible Historiale
The Bible historiale is a French version of the Bible composed at the end of the thirteenth century by Guyart des Moulins, a canon of the collegiate church of Saint-Pierre at Aire-sur-la-Lys…
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The Tell Fakhariyeh Bilingual Statue and the Earliest Aramaic Royal Inscription
The Tell Fakhariyeh statue is a basalt figure of a standing ruler, about two metres high with its base, which was found in 1979 at the foot of an ancient mound near…
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The Ekron Royal Dedicatory Inscription
In the summer of 1996, during the last major season of excavation at Tel Miqne, the site of the Philistine city of Ekron, archaeologists working in the sanctuary of a large temple…
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The Carolingian Bibles of Alcuin and Theodulf
At the end of the eighth century two scholars at the court of Charlemagne undertook, independently of one another, to provide the Frankish church with a corrected text of the Latin Bible.…
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The Wycliffite Bible and the First Complete English Translation
The Wycliffite Bible is the name given to the translations of the whole of the Latin Bible into English that were made in the last two decades of the fourteenth century by…
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Ugarit and the Ras Shamra Tablets
On the coast of northern Syria, a short distance from the Mediterranean and some ten kilometres north of the modern city of Latakia, rises the mound of Ras Shamra, the “cape of…
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Kuntillet Ajrud
In the north-eastern corner of the Sinai peninsula, on a low and isolated hill above a broad plain of sand and gravel, lie the ruins of a small building that was occupied…
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The Samaria Ostraca and the Administration of the Kingdom of Israel
On the summit of a steep, isolated hill in the central highlands of Palestine stood Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel for some one hundred and fifty years. In…
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The Arad Ostraca and the Archive of Eliashib
In the northern Negev, on a low hill at the eastern end of the Beersheba Valley, stand the remains of a small fortress that guarded the southern frontier of the kingdom of…
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Moses Mendelssohn’s Biur and the German Pentateuch
Between 1780 and 1783 a new edition of the Pentateuch was published at Berlin under the title Sefer netivot ha-shalom, “the book of the paths of peace”. It contained the Hebrew text,…
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The Tsene-Rene, the Yiddish Women’s Bible
The Tsene-rene is a Yiddish work on the Pentateuch, the weekly readings from the Prophets and the Five Scrolls, composed in the late sixteenth century by Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów,…
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The Ferrara Bible of 1553
In 1553 a Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible was printed at Ferrara, in northern Italy, under the title Biblia en lengua española traduzida palabra por palabra de la verdad hebrayca, “the…
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The Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates
For more than a thousand years the Bible of the Latin church was the translation associated with Jerome, known from the sixteenth century as the Vulgate. Yet until the end of that…
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Codex Gigas, the Devil’s Bible
In the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm there is a Latin manuscript so large that two people are needed to lift it. Its leaves measure close to ninety centimetres in height…
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…
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The Rossano Gospels and the Purple Codices
In the cathedral town of Rossano in Calabria, in the south of Italy, the diocesan museum keeps a Greek Gospel book of the sixth century whose pages are dyed a deep reddish…