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,…
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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…
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The Erfurt Hebrew Bibles and the Ashkenazi Scribal Tradition
Among the Hebrew manuscripts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is a group of books that once belonged to the Jewish community of Erfurt, a trading city in Thuringia in central Germany. They…
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The Georgian Bible
Among the ancient translations of the Bible, the Georgian version has been one of the slowest to receive general attention outside the Caucasus. It was made in a language unrelated to Greek,…
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The Severus Scroll
Among the countless lost codices and scrolls of classical and late antique Judaism, none possesses a more remarkable historical pedigree or exerts a more enduring fascination for biblical textual critics than the…
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The Washington Pentateuch
When historians of the Hebrew Bible and scholars of Semitic paleography survey the surviving monuments of early medieval biblical transmission, the academic discourse is almost universally anchored around a select group of…
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Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus
Among the treasures of medieval biblical codicology, few manuscripts have exerted as profound a transformative influence on Semitic philology, textual criticism, and the history of the Hebrew language as the codex catalogued…
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Tiqqune Soferim
Within the annals of textual transmission, few religious traditions have guarded the integrity of their sacred scriptures with the meticulous, mathematical rigor demonstrated by the Jewish scribes (Soferim) and their medieval successors,…
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The Gutenberg Bible
Somewhere in the year 1454 or 1455, in a rented workshop in the city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg pulled the bar of a wooden screw press and lifted away…
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The Aramaic Tongue
Of the languages of the ancient Near East, one has the odd distinction of having been spoken almost everywhere and written in almost nowhere, until suddenly it was written everywhere. Aramaic began…
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The Armenian Bible
Armenia had no written literature at all until the fifth century of the common era. When Mesrop Mashtots, a former royal secretary who had become a priest and then a hermit, sat…
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The Pale of Settlement
On 23 December 1791 the Empress Catherine the Great signed a decree that fixed the residence of the Jews of the Russian Empire inside a line drawn across the western territories of…
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The Syriac New Testament
In the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a scholar lifted a palimpsest from a shelf and found beneath it the oldest surviving…
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The Cuthbert Gospel
The Cuthbert Gospel is the smallest surviving book of the early medieval west and the oldest one that has never been taken apart: a pocket volume of ninety-four vellum leaves, 137 by…
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The Oxyrhynchus Papyri
On 12 January 1897, the second day of the first season of excavation at a rubbish tip outside the walls of a dead town in the Faiyum, two Oxford scholars picked up…
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Jews from Kiev and Western Culture
Rising upon the steep, forested bluffs that dominate the right bank of the Dnieper River, Kiev has stood for well over a millennium as the geopolitical hinge of Eastern Europe. It was…
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Isaac of Chernigov
In the royal Exchequer accounts compiled at Westminster for the Michaelmas audit of 1181—the twenty-seventh regnal year of King Henry II of England—the clerk of the Pipe Roll inscribed a terse, extraordinary…
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The Soncino Dynasty
In the spring of 1483, when the municipal council of the fortified borough of Soncino in the lower territory of Cremona granted an imperial patent to a family of German-Jewish loan bankers…
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The Murashu Scribes
In the late spring of 1893, on the mound of ancient Nippur in Iraq, a workman clearing collapsed rubble from a room found clay tablets lying on the floor where they had…
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…
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The Kaufmann Manuscript A15
For most of the twentieth century the received Hebrew Bible was described, with a confidence that by then felt like a fact of nature, as the recension of a single man. Aaron…
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From Vellum to Unicode: The Westminster Leningrad Codex
The Hebrew text of the Bible most widely read on screens today descends from a single parchment book. The Leningrad Codex, copied in Cairo in the year 1008 or 1009 and now…
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The 1975 New Finds at Sinai and the Sinai Palimpsests Project
In May 1975, during work to clear and repair part of the fortified Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, the monks opened a room beneath the chapel of…