Masada and the Hebrew Scroll of Ben Sira

On 8 April 1964, in the second half of the first season of excavations at Masada, volunteers clearing a small room in the casemate wall of the fortress uncovered fragments of a leather scroll written in Hebrew. Within days the scroll was identified as a copy of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, a book of the second century BC that the Jewish canon had not preserved and that had survived for most of history only in Greek, Latin and Syriac translations. The Masada copy, written in the first century BC, was more than a thousand years older than any other Hebrew manuscript of the book then known. It answered, at a stroke, a question that had divided scholars since the 1890s: whether the medieval Hebrew manuscripts of Ben Sira recovered from the Cairo Geniza preserved the author’s original text or a later retranslation. This article describes the fortress and its fall, the book of Ben Sira and its transmission, the excavations of Yigael Yadin, and the scrolls that were found there.¹

The Fortress

Herod's Masada

Masada is an isolated plateau on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert, rising some 400 metres above the western shore of the Dead Sea.² Its summit, roughly 600 metres long and 300 metres wide at its broadest, is bounded on every side by cliffs, and in antiquity it could be reached only by two difficult paths, the winding “Snake Path” from the east and a shorter route from the west. The Hasmonean rulers of Judaea first fortified it in the second or first century BC. Between about 37 and 4 BC Herod the Great transformed it into a palace-fortress, with a casemate wall around the edge of the summit, storehouses, bathhouses, cisterns cut into the rock and fed by aqueducts from the wadis, and two palaces, one of which, the Northern Palace, hung in three terraces down the northern cliff.³

The Jewish historian Josephus, who is the principal ancient source for Masada, says that Herod prepared the fortress as a refuge for himself against two dangers: a rising of the Jewish people, who might seek to restore the Hasmonean dynasty, and the ambitions of Cleopatra of Egypt, who wished Mark Antony to give her Herod’s kingdom.⁴ The stores of grain, wine, oil and weapons that Herod laid up there were, according to Josephus, still usable a century later.

The Revolt and the Siege

At the beginning of the revolt against Rome in AD 66, a group of Jewish rebels seized Masada from its Roman garrison.⁵ Josephus calls them Sicarii, “dagger men”, a radical faction whose members had carried out assassinations in Jerusalem, and names their leader as Eleazar son of Yair.⁶ After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 Masada was one of the last rebel strongholds. The Roman governor Lucius Flavius Silva besieged it with the Tenth Legion and auxiliary troops, surrounding the mountain with a wall and eight camps, whose outlines are still clearly visible, and building a great ramp of earth and timber against the western side.⁷ The fortress fell in the spring of AD 73 or 74.

Josephus’s account of the end is the most famous passage in his history. He reports that when the Romans breached the wall, Eleazar persuaded the defenders to kill their families and themselves rather than be taken alive, and that when the Romans entered they found 960 dead, with only two women and five children, who had hidden, surviving to tell the story.⁸⁹ The account has been much discussed. Josephus was not present, the speeches he gives Eleazar are literary compositions in the manner of Greek historians, and the archaeological evidence for the mass death is limited; on the other hand his description of the fortress and the siege works has proved accurate in many details. Historians differ on how far the story of the collective suicide should be accepted, and the modern use of Masada as a national symbol has itself become a subject of study.¹⁰¹¹

Ben Sira and His Book

The Author

The book found at Masada was written in Jerusalem in the early second century BC by a teacher whom the text itself names as Joshua (in Greek, Jesus) son of Eleazar son of Sira.¹² It is a long collection of instruction in the manner of the Book of Proverbs, dealing with the fear of God, the conduct of life, friendship, wealth, speech, family, health and the duties of the scribe, followed by a hymn in praise of “famous men”, the great figures of Israel’s history from Enoch to the high priest Simon son of Onias, whom the author had evidently seen officiating in the Temple. Simon is usually identified with Simon II, high priest around 219 to 196 BC, and the book is therefore dated to about 190 to 180 BC, before the crisis under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV that led to the Maccabean revolt.¹³

Ben Sira belongs to the tradition of wisdom literature, but he differs from earlier wise men in identifying wisdom explicitly with the Law of Moses: in chapter 24 Wisdom, personified as a woman, declares that she came forth from the mouth of the Most High and found her resting place in Jerusalem, and the author adds that “all this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law which Moses commanded”.¹⁴ He also shows a strong attachment to the Temple and the priesthood. His book is therefore an important witness to Jewish thought in the generation before the Maccabees.

The Grandson's Translation

The book is known to most readers through a Greek translation made in Egypt by the author’s grandson. In a prologue, he explains that he came to Egypt “in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of King Euergetes”, that is, Ptolemy VIII, which corresponds to 132 BC, and that he made the translation with much labour, because “what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language”. He adds that the same is true of “the Law itself, the prophecies and the rest of the books”, a sentence that is among the earliest witnesses to a three-part collection of Jewish scripture.¹⁵¹⁶

The grandson’s Greek entered the Septuagint under the title Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, and from it the Old Latin translation, which Jerome did not revise, passed into the Vulgate under the name Ecclesiasticus, “the church book”, perhaps because of its use in instruction. A Syriac translation, made from the Hebrew, was included in the Peshitta. The book is canonical in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and is placed among the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles.¹⁷

The Hebrew Book in Jewish Tradition

In Judaism, Ben Sira was not included in the canon of scripture, but it was not forgotten. The rabbis of the Talmud quote it, sometimes with approval and sometimes as an example of an “outside book” that should not be read, and some of its sayings are cited with the formula used for scripture. Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, says he had seen a Hebrew copy. Saadia Gaon in the tenth century quotes it in Hebrew. After that the Hebrew text disappeared from view, and for some seven centuries no copy was known to exist.¹⁸¹⁹

The Hebrew Rediscovered

The Cairo Geniza

The recovery of the Hebrew Ben Sira began in Cambridge in May 1896. Two Scottish scholars, the twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, had bought a number of manuscript leaves in Cairo and showed them to Solomon Schechter, then Reader in Talmudic at the university.²⁰ Schechter recognised one of them as a leaf of the Hebrew text of Ben Sira and published it in the same year.²¹ At about the same time leaves of the same work were identified at Oxford. The discovery prompted Schechter’s journey to Cairo in the winter of 1896 to 1897, where he obtained, with the permission of the community, the greater part of the contents of the geniza, the storeroom for worn-out sacred writings, of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat.²² The material he brought back to Cambridge, about 190,000 fragments now forming the Taylor-Schechter Collection, has been studied ever since.²³

Among the Geniza fragments, scholars identified parts of six medieval manuscripts of Ben Sira, conventionally lettered A to F, copied between about the tenth and twelfth centuries. Together they preserve about two-thirds of the book. Some are written in a continuous text, while manuscript B is written stichometrically, in two half-lines to each line, with marginal notes recording variant readings. Further leaves continued to be identified into the twenty-first century.²⁴²⁵

Original or Retranslation?

The Geniza discoveries did not settle the question of the original text. The Hebrew of the manuscripts differed in many places from the Greek and the Syriac, and in some passages it seemed to some scholars to be awkward or late in style. In 1899 the Oxford scholar David Samuel Margoliouth argued that the Geniza text was not the original at all but a medieval retranslation into Hebrew from Persian or Syriac. Others defended its authenticity, while admitting that it had been corrupted in transmission and in places corrected from the versions. The debate continued, with diminishing intensity, for more than sixty years.²⁶²⁷

The discoveries in the Judaean Desert after 1947 brought the first ancient evidence. Small fragments of chapter 6 were found in Qumran Cave 2, and the great Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 contained a Hebrew text of the acrostic poem on wisdom that closes the book in chapter 51. These texts were too short to decide the larger question, but they showed that Ben Sira was read in Hebrew in the late Second Temple period.²⁸

The Excavation of Masada

Yadin's Expedition

Masada had been identified with the site described by Josephus in 1838, and surveyed by Western travellers and later by Israeli scholars. A survey of 1955 and 1956 by the Hebrew University and the Israel Exploration Society established the plan of the Northern Palace. The full excavation, however, was undertaken by Yigael Yadin, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University and former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, who had already directed the excavations at Hazor and the explorations of the caves of Nahal Hever.²⁹

Yadin’s expedition worked at Masada for two seasons, from October 1963 to May 1964 and from November 1964 to April 1965, a total of about eleven months. It was one of the largest archaeological projects of its time. Alongside Israeli staff, soldiers and students, it used thousands of volunteers from Israel and many other countries, recruited through newspaper advertisements, notably in the London Observer, who lived in a camp at the foot of the mountain and climbed to the summit each day.³⁰ The expedition cleared almost the entire summit, including the palaces, storehouses, bathhouses and the casemate wall, and it restored many structures, which are now part of a national park and a World Heritage Site.³¹

The excavators found abundant evidence of the rebels’ occupation. They had lived in the rooms of the casemate wall, which they divided with partitions, and had built ovens, cupboards and benches there. They had converted a Herodian building into a synagogue, and constructed ritual baths. In the rooms the excavators found cooking pots, baskets, clothing, coins of the revolt, arrowheads and the remains of fires. Among the ostraca was a group of small inscribed sherds, one bearing the name “ben Yair”, which Yadin connected with the drawing of lots described by Josephus; this interpretation remains debated.³²³³

The Discovery of the Scroll

The Ben Sira scroll was found in a room of the casemate wall on 8 April 1964. It lay among the debris of the rebels’ occupation, crumpled and torn, apparently discarded or scattered when the fortress fell. The leather had darkened and in places was badly decayed, but substantial parts survived: fragments of seven columns containing portions of chapters 39 to 44 of the book, from the latter part of the hymn on the works of God to the beginning of the praise of the fathers, about 26 verses well preserved and many more in fragments.³⁴³⁵

Yadin published the scroll the following year in a volume issued jointly by the Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, the museum built in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls.³⁶³⁷ He dated the handwriting to the first half of the first century BC, and other palaeographers have placed it in the same period, so that the copy was written within about a century of the book’s composition. It was therefore not only the oldest Hebrew copy of Ben Sira but one of the oldest manuscripts of any Jewish work outside the canon.

The Form of the Scroll

The scroll is written stichometrically, like the Geniza manuscript B, with each line divided into two half-lines separated by a space, so that the parallel members of each verse stand side by side. This was the arrangement used for poetic books in some Qumran manuscripts, such as certain copies of Psalms, and it reflects the poetic form of the work. The script is a fine example of the formal Jewish book hand of the late Hasmonean or early Herodian period.³⁸

What the Scroll Showed

The Geniza Text Confirmed

The importance of the Masada scroll lay in its comparison with the Geniza manuscripts. Where the two overlapped, chiefly with manuscript B, the agreement was close, often word for word, and in several passages the Masada text agreed with readings that manuscript B gave only in its margin. The medieval Hebrew text, it now appeared, was substantially the same text that had circulated in Judaea in the first century BC. The hypothesis that it was a medieval retranslation could no longer be held.³⁹⁴⁰

The scroll did not, however, show that the Geniza manuscripts were free of corruption. It differed from manuscript B in many details, and in some cases it supported readings in the Greek or Syriac against the medieval Hebrew. Scholars concluded that the Hebrew text of Ben Sira had existed in more than one form already in antiquity, perhaps because the author or his followers revised it, perhaps because it was expanded by later copyists, and that the Greek of the grandson was made from a Hebrew text different from both. The book of Ben Sira thus became one of the clearest examples of a Jewish text with a complex transmission history in which ancient copies, medieval copies and translations must all be weighed.⁴¹⁴²

Ben Sira at Masada

The presence of the scroll at Masada raises its own questions. Ben Sira was not a sectarian composition; it was a work of mainstream priestly wisdom, written in Jerusalem a century before the Qumran community flourished. Its presence among the possessions of the rebels shows that it was read, alongside the biblical books, by Jews of very different outlooks in the first century AD. It does not tell us whether they regarded it as scripture, but it is a sign of the book’s wide circulation and of the wider range of literature read in the period before the canon was fixed.⁴³⁴⁴

The Contents of the Masada Columns

The Works of God

The surviving columns of the scroll begin in the final part of the section that modern commentators call the hymn on the works of God, which runs from chapter 39 to chapter 43. In chapter 39 the author reflects on the goodness of everything that God has made, declaring that “all the works of the Lord are good”, and that each thing has its time: water, fire, iron, salt, wheat, milk, honey, wine, oil and clothing are good for the righteous, while for sinners they turn to evil. Chapter 40 describes the troubles that afflict every human life, “from the one who sits on a glorious throne to the one who is humbled in dust and ashes”, and goes on to a series of comparisons in which one good thing is set above another, ending with the fear of the Lord, which is “like a garden of blessing”.⁴⁵

Chapter 41 contains a meditation on death, which the author treats with restraint: death is bitter to the man at peace among his possessions, but welcome to the poor and the failing, and it is “the decree of the Lord for all flesh”. It then passes to a discussion of shame, distinguishing the things of which one ought to be ashamed from those of which one ought not. Chapter 42 continues the theme and includes a passage on the anxieties of a father for his daughter, which has attracted attention in modern discussion of the book’s attitude to women. The second half of chapter 42 and the whole of chapter 43 form a hymn to God as creator, describing the sun, the moon, the stars, the rainbow, snow, frost, the winds and the sea, and concluding that “we could say more and never come to the end; let the final word be: he is all”.⁴⁶

The Praise of the Fathers

The scroll then reaches chapter 44, where the long section on the great figures of Israel’s history begins. In the Greek text this section has a heading, “Praise of the Fathers”, and the Geniza manuscript B gives a Hebrew heading, “Praise of the fathers of old”. The Masada scroll preserves the same Hebrew heading, confirming that it belonged to the ancient text and was not a medieval addition. The opening verse, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generations”, in the familiar English of the King James Version, is among the most quoted passages of the Apocrypha. The scroll breaks off in the early verses of the chapter, so that it contains the introduction to the praise of the fathers but not the portraits of individual figures that follow.⁴⁷⁴⁸

The overlap between the scroll and manuscript B in these chapters made possible a detailed comparison. Yadin’s edition set out the Masada text alongside the Geniza readings, and later editors refined the reading of damaged letters. Several passages that had seemed obscure in the Geniza manuscript were clarified, and in others the scroll showed that a reading suspected of being a medieval corruption was in fact ancient. In a number of verses the Masada text and the margin of manuscript B agree against its main text, which suggests that the medieval scribe who wrote the margin had access to a second copy belonging to the same ancient tradition.⁴⁹⁵⁰

The Other Masada Scrolls

Biblical Manuscripts

The Ben Sira scroll was one of fifteen literary manuscripts found at Masada, all in Hebrew or Aramaic, published in their final form by Shemaryahu Talmon and Yadin in 1999.⁵¹ Seven of them are copies of biblical books. Two copies of Leviticus were found: one containing parts of chapter 4, the other a substantial portion of chapters 8 to 12. There are fragments of Deuteronomy 33 and 34 and of Psalms, including a scroll containing parts of Psalms 81 to 85 and a fragment of Psalm 150. The most substantial biblical find was a copy of Ezekiel containing portions of chapters 35 to 38, including part of the vision of the valley of dry bones in chapter 37, discovered buried in two pits beneath the floor of the synagogue.⁵²⁵³

All of these biblical manuscripts agree closely with the consonantal text later standardised by the Masoretes. The differences are mostly minor matters of spelling, and in the Psalms the division of the text into verses and psalms follows the later Masoretic arrangement. In this they contrast with the more varied texts found at Qumran, where some manuscripts agree with the Masoretic tradition and others with the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch or with none of these. Emanuel Tov and other scholars have seen in the Masada texts, as in those from the caves of Nahal Hever and Wadi Murabba’at, evidence that by the first century AD the proto-Masoretic text was dominant among Jews outside the Qumran community, perhaps under the influence of the Temple in Jerusalem.⁵⁴

Non-Biblical Texts

Besides Ben Sira, the Masada literary texts include fragments of works previously known from Qumran or otherwise unknown. The most notable is a copy of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, a liturgical work describing the worship of the angels in the heavenly Temple, which had been found in several copies at Qumran. Its presence at Masada has been explained in different ways: as evidence that the work was used beyond the Qumran community; as a sign that members of the community, or their books, reached Masada after Qumran was destroyed in AD 68; or simply as an indication of the wide circulation of such texts. There are also fragments of works related to Genesis, Joshua and the book of Jubilees.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The site also produced documents of another kind. Latin and Greek papyri, including a fragment with a line of Virgil’s Aeneid and records of soldiers’ pay, come from the Roman garrison that occupied the fortress after its fall. Hundreds of ostraca in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin record names, rations and tithes. Together they give a picture of everyday life on the mountain both before and after the siege.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Masada and the Wider Judaean Desert Finds

The Masada discoveries belong to the series of finds that began with the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 and continued in the 1950s and 1960s at Wadi Murabba’at, Nahal Hever and other sites. The caves of Nahal Hever, explored by Yadin and others in 1960 and 1961, yielded the documents of the Bar Kokhba revolt described in a separate article on the Bar Kokhba letters, as well as biblical fragments and a Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets. Masada differs from these sites in being a settlement whose manuscripts can be dated with unusual precision: everything found among the rebels’ belongings must have been written before the fortress fell in AD 73 or 74.⁵⁹⁶⁰

This terminus is of great value for palaeography. Because the latest possible date of the Masada scrolls is fixed by history, they serve as reference points for the dating of the Qumran manuscripts by handwriting, and they have been used to confirm that the formal scripts of the Qumran scrolls belong to the period before the destruction of the Temple. Images of the Masada scrolls, with those from Qumran and other sites, are now accessible through the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library of the Israel Antiquities Authority.⁶¹

Ben Sira and the Formation of Scripture

The Testimony of the Prologue

Ben Sira’s book is important not only for its own text but for what it reveals about scripture in the second century BC. The grandson’s prologue refers three times to “the Law and the Prophets and the other books” or similar phrases, and the hymn of the fathers in chapters 44 to 49 follows the order of the biblical narrative from Genesis through Kings, mentions Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel by name, and refers to “the twelve prophets”, the earliest known reference to the Minor Prophets as a single collection. These passages show that by about 180 BC the Law and the Prophets were already established as authoritative collections in Jerusalem, while the third division remained less clearly defined.⁶²⁶³

Ben Sira himself was not included in any of these divisions in the Hebrew Bible, and the reasons are not entirely clear. The rabbinic tradition held that prophecy had ceased in the Persian period, and a book whose author was known to have lived in the Hellenistic age could not claim prophetic authority. The book’s popularity and the rabbinic citations nonetheless show that it continued to be read and valued. Among the Christians who received it through the Greek, it was used for moral instruction, and it was treated as scripture by many of the church fathers.⁶⁴

A Text Between Canons

The history of Ben Sira’s text is therefore unusual. A book written in Hebrew and widely read by Jews was preserved chiefly by Christians in translation, while its Hebrew original survived only by chance, in a rebel’s room on Masada and in the storeroom of a medieval synagogue. The Masada scroll shows that, in the century before the destruction of the Temple, the book was copied with the same care and in the same format as the biblical books themselves. Its later exclusion from the Jewish canon and the loss of its Hebrew text were consequences of decisions taken after that time.⁶⁵⁶⁶

The Text of Ben Sira Today

Editions

The finds of the twentieth century transformed the study of Ben Sira. Before 1896 scholars depended entirely on translations; today about two-thirds of the book exists in Hebrew, in manuscripts from Masada, Qumran and the Cairo Geniza. Pancratius Beentjes’s edition of 1997 brought together all the Hebrew manuscripts in a single volume with a synopsis of parallel texts, and the online edition of the Hebrew manuscripts, with images and transcriptions, has made the evidence available to a wider public.⁶⁷⁶⁸

Translations have also changed. Modern Bibles that include Ben Sira, such as the New Revised Standard Version and the New American Bible, now translate in many places from the Hebrew where it is available, while continuing to use the Greek where it is not, and they record the most important differences in notes. In the commentary of Patrick Skehan and Alexander Di Lella, published in 1987, the Hebrew and the versions are weighed verse by verse.⁶⁹

Questions That Remain

Several problems remain unresolved. The relation between the shorter and longer forms of the Greek and Hebrew texts, the extent of later additions, and the nature of the Hebrew used by the grandson are still debated. The Masada scroll covers only chapters 39 to 44, and for much of the book the Geniza manuscripts remain the only Hebrew witnesses. Each new identification of a Geniza leaf adds to the evidence, and the comparison of manuscripts across a thousand years continues to refine our understanding of how a book outside the Hebrew canon was copied and corrected.⁷⁰⁷¹

The scroll found in a rebel’s room on Masada thus links several stories: the writing of a book of wisdom in Jerusalem around 180 BC, its translation in Ptolemaic Egypt, its preservation in Christian Bibles and its near disappearance in Hebrew, its recovery from a Cairo storeroom in 1896, and the last days of a fortress on the Dead Sea. Its significance for the history of the biblical text is that it showed, through direct comparison with medieval copies, how much and how little a Hebrew text could change over a millennium of transmission.

Notes

1. Grokipedia, “Yigael Yadin”. ↩
2. Grokipedia, “Masada”. ↩
3. Grokipedia, “Herod the Great”. ↩
4. Josephus, The Jewish War 7.252–406, in the translation of William Whiston. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “First Jewish–Roman War”. ↩
6. Grokipedia, “Sicarii”. ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Lucius Flavius Silva”. ↩
8. Josephus, The Jewish War 7.252–406, in the translation of William Whiston. ↩
9. Grokipedia, “Siege of Masada”. ↩
10. Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩
11. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Ben Sira”. ↩
13. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Wisdom literature”. ↩
15. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Book of Sirach”. ↩
17. Grokipedia, “Deuterocanonical books”. ↩
18. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
19. Grokipedia, “Ben Sira”. ↩
20. Grokipedia, “Solomon Schechter”. ↩
21. Solomon Schechter, “A Fragment of the Original Text of Ecclesiasticus”, The Expositor, 5th series, 4 (1896), 1–15. ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”. ↩
23. Cambridge University Library, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit. ↩
24. Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
25. Ben Sira: The Hebrew Manuscripts, digital edition of the Hebrew manuscripts with images. ↩
26. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
27. Benjamin G. Wright III, No Small Difference: Sirach’s Relationship to Its Hebrew Parent Text (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
28. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Yigael Yadin”. ↩
30. Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). ↩
31. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Masada, inscribed 2001. ↩
32. Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). ↩
33. Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩
34. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
35. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
36. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
37. Grokipedia, “Shrine of the Book”. ↩
38. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
39. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
40. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
41. Benjamin G. Wright III, No Small Difference: Sirach’s Relationship to Its Hebrew Parent Text (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
42. Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
43. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
44. Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩
45. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
46. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
47. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
48. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
49. Yigael Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and the Shrine of the Book, 1965). ↩
50. Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
51. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
52. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
53. Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). ↩
54. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
55. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
56. Hanan Eshel, “The Fate of Scrolls and Fragments: A Survey from 1946 to the Present”, in Maxine L. Grossman (ed.), Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 33–50. ↩
57. Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealots’ Last Stand (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). ↩
58. Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩
59. Hanan Eshel, “The Fate of Scrolls and Fragments: A Survey from 1946 to the Present”, in Maxine L. Grossman (ed.), Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 33–50. ↩
60. Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. ↩
61. Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. ↩
62. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
63. Grokipedia, “Book of Sirach”. ↩
64. Grokipedia, “Deuterocanonical books”. ↩
65. Shemaryahu Talmon and Yigael Yadin, Masada VI: Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports: Hebrew Fragments from Masada; The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999). ↩
66. Grokipedia, “Ben Sira”. ↩
67. Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩
68. Ben Sira: The Hebrew Manuscripts, digital edition of the Hebrew manuscripts with images. ↩
69. Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↩
70. Benjamin G. Wright III, No Small Difference: Sirach’s Relationship to Its Hebrew Parent Text (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
71. Pancratius C. Beentjes, The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1997). ↩