Essays on the Masoretes and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles
Codex Alexandrinus is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, one of the four great uncial codices of the 4th and 5th centuries, and it is, on substantial points of the textual…
Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, the manuscript that sits at the head of the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament and of substantial portions…
Codex Sinaiticus is, in the modern inventory of biblical manuscripts, one of the four corner-stones of Greek New Testament textual criticism. Together with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, it…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It is one of the longest biblical manuscripts ever found from antiquity. Written in Hebrew, on seventeen columns of leather, it contains every chapter of the book of Isaiah from the disputed…
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…
On a winter afternoon in 2023, in Gallery 503 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, the second volume of a 15th-century Hebrew manuscript rests open on a low wooden…
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…
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,…
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…
Of the roughly nine hundred manuscripts recovered from the eleven caves of Qumran between 1947 and 1956, only one was never written on parchment or papyrus. It was etched, line by careful…
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…
For roughly a thousand years a chamber above the women’s gallery of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in Fustat, the old Egyptian capital that medieval travellers knew as Cairo, acted as a kind…
For nearly three centuries before Origen began the work that would make him famous, the Greek-speaking church had lived by the Septuagint. The legend of the Seventy had given it the prestige…
