Places
The John Rylands Library and Its Bible Scholarship
On a wet New Year’s morning in 1900, the bells of Manchester were still ringing when the widow Enriqueta Augustina Rylands led a small group of invited guests through the bronze doors…
The Journal
Guardians of the Sacred Text
Essays on the Masoretes and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles
Latest in the Journal
Scripture
The Tiberian Masorah and the Schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali
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…
Transmission
The Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1
The Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, catalogued as 1QIsaa, takes its place in the long history of Hebrew Bible manuscripts as the largest and best preserved of the seven original Dead Sea…
Scripture
The Damascus Pentateuch
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.…
Scripture
The Peshitta and Its Hebrew Vorlage
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…
Scripture
The Leningrad Codex
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…
Scripture
The Masorah of the Former Prophets
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…
Hebrew
The Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna
The text of the Hebrew Bible, as it now sits between the covers of a printed Mikraot Gedolot or a single-volume Hebrew Tanakh, looks deceptively clean. Page after page of square Aramaic…
Scripture
The Damascus Document
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,…
Scripture
The Psalms Scroll from Cave 11
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,…
Scripture
The Samaritan Pentateuch
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,…
Scripture
The Nash Papyrus
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,…
Transmission
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The seven scrolls that came out of the caves in the winter of 1947 were the beginning, not the whole story. What followed was fifteen years of Bedouin and archaeological finds, a…
Books
Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex
Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible was published by Algonquin Books in May 2012 and won the Jewish Book Council’s…
Scholars
William Wickes and the Hebrew Accents
In the spring of 1881, at the Clarendon Press in Oxford, a small octavo volume appeared under the title A Treatise on the Accentuation of the Three So-called Poetical Books of the…
Transmission
Daniel Bomberg’s Venice Press
On a Sabbath afternoon in October 1553, in the Piazza San Marco of Venice, a large pile of Hebrew books was set alight by officers of the Papal Inquisition. Among the books…
Scripture
The Cairo Genizah
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…
Transmission
The Crown of Aleppo
In the spring of 1958 a single bound parchment codex, wrapped in cloth and hidden in a small suitcase, was carried across the Syrian–Turkish border by a cheese merchant named Murad Faham.…
Books
Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible
The third edition of Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, published in 2012 by Fortress Press, is the standard textbook on the subject, and a 2026 reader who wants a…
Scholars
Christian David Ginsburg
On a December day in 1897, in a reading room on Queen Victoria Street in London, a Christian scholar in his late sixties was checking the last proofs of the third volume…
Places
The Tiberias Masoretes
On a low stone shelf above the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, a city once called Tiberias has been, since the second century, the principal Jewish intellectual centre of the…
Reformation
The Complutensian Polyglot
On a January day in 1514 a French-born printer named Arnao Guillén de Brocar finished, in a workshop on the Plaza de San Diego in Alcalá de Henares, the first printed New…
Transmission
The Leningrad Codex and the Colophon of 1008
In a reading room on the Neva, opposite the Winter Palace, a Hebrew Bible of nearly five hundred parchment folios lies open on a stand. Its pages are a soft cream, its…
Transmission
Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible
Between 1524 and 1525 a Venetian printing house finished a Hebrew Bible in four folio volumes that would shape most Hebrew Bibles printed over the next four centuries. Its publisher was Daniel…