Transmission
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…
The Journal
Guardians of the Sacred Text
Essays on the Masoretes and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles
Latest in the Journal
Transmission
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…
Transmission
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…
Scholars
Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon was born in Cordoba in 1138, the son of a judge who was still a refugee from the Almohad conquest of his city when the boy began to learn…
Transmission
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…
Transmission
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…
Transmission
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…
Places
A Crown of Paper
Two objects kept in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo bore the same name, and neither of them resembled the other. One was a worked mass of silver, made to be fitted over…
Scripture
Bezalel and the Ark of the Covenant
The specifications for the sanctuary in Exodus read like a contract drafted by someone who expected it to be audited. They give the length of the Ark in cubits and half cubits,…
Places
Licoricia of Winchester
In the medieval topography of Winchester, ancient capital of the Saxon kings and long the ceremonial treasury of the Norman and Angevin monarchs, memory has always been bound to stone, water, and…
Transmission
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…
Scripture
The Scrolls of Augsburg
Inside the synagogue on Halderstrasse in Augsburg, in the small hours of 10 November 1938, the caretaker was made to unlock his own front door. Twenty or thirty men pushed past him,…
Scripture
The Habakkuk Scroll
Lying open along its whole length in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a scroll a little under a metre and a half long, and the eye has to travel sideways across…
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…
Scripture
The Aleppo Codex
Inside the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, in a sealed chamber kept at a constant temperature, rests a book with no beginning. Two thirds of it survive. The Pentateuch is gone,…
Scripture
The Kennicott Bible
On Wednesday, the twenty-fourth day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 5236, corresponding in the Julian calendar to 24 July 1476, two Jewish artisans put the finishing touches on…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos and the Birth of Aramaic Scripture
Few documents of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic periods have been more continuously used than the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that Jewish tradition calls Targum Onkelos. It is the…
Scripture
Saadya Gaon and the Birth of Masoretic Scholarship
In October 942, in a town called Suf on the left bank of the Tigris, perhaps a few days ride north of Baghdad, a Jewish scholar of about sixty died. His name…
Transmission
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…
Transmission
The Westminster Leningrad Codex in Digital Form
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…
Transmission
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…
Transmission
The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri
In November 1931 the readers of The Times learned that a collection of Greek biblical manuscripts on papyrus, older than any complete Bible then known, had been acquired by the American-born collector…
Transmission
P52, the Rylands Fragment of the Gospel of John
In the collections of the John Rylands Library in Manchester there is a scrap of papyrus a little smaller than a playing card. It carries on one side parts of seven lines…
Transmission
The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension
In August 1952 a group of Taamireh Bedouin brought to Jerusalem a bundle of leather fragments written in Greek. They had come, it later became clear, from a cave high in the…