Essays on the Masoretes and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles
In the seventy-five years between the death of William Tyndale in 1536 and the publication of the King James Version in 1611, the English Bible passed from a forbidden book, printed abroad…
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…
The chapters and verses by which the Bible is now cited are not part of the original texts. The books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were written without numbered…
Between 1568 and 1657 three great polyglot Bibles were printed in Europe, at Antwerp, at Paris and at London. Each set the text of Scripture in its original languages beside the ancient…
In the summer of 863 two brothers from Thessalonica arrived at the court of a Slavic prince north of the Danube carrying books written in an alphabet that had not existed a…
In 1488, in the small Lombard town of Soncino between Cremona and Brescia, a family of Jewish printers completed the first edition of the entire Hebrew Bible to be produced with movable…
Before Jerome produced the Latin translation that later generations knew as the Vulgate, the churches of the Latin-speaking West had already been reading the Bible in Latin for some two hundred years.…
In the second half of the eighteenth century two scholars, working independently in Oxford and Parma, undertook the most ambitious surveys of Hebrew biblical manuscripts that had ever been attempted. Benjamin Kennicott,…
In the second half of the second century a Christian teacher from the eastern edge of the Roman world composed a book that, for a time, was more widely read in some…
Among the many printed aids to the reading of the Hebrew Bible, few have had so lasting an effect on the text itself as the Masoretic commentary of Jedidiah Solomon ben Abraham…
In 1538 a small book in Hebrew was printed at Venice under the title Masoret ha-Masoret, “The Tradition of the Tradition”. Its author was Elijah ben Asher ha-Levi, known to Christian scholars…
In December 1945, below the limestone cliffs of the Jabal al-Tarif on the eastern side of the Nile, a few kilometres from the town of Nag Hammadi, a group of villagers digging…
The question of when Hebrew was first written down has no single answer, and the two objects most often cited in reply illustrate why. The first is a small limestone tablet found…
On a hilltop east of the town of Adwa, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, stands the monastery of Abba Garima, named after one of the holy men who, according to…
In the spring of 1967 a team from Leiden University, working at Tell Deir Alla in the central Jordan Valley, recovered a mass of broken lime plaster from the debris of an…
In the exhibition hall of Carolina Rediviva, the main building of Uppsala University Library, a double opening of a sixth-century book lies under glass beside a chased silver cover made in seventeenth-century…
On the first day of February in 1954 a young Belgian Dominican named Josef Starcky knelt in front of a long strip of dark leather laid out on the floor of the…
Every printed Hebrew Bible uses the Tiberian vowel points: dots and dashes set mostly beneath the letters, worked out by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the early Middle Ages. For several centuries…
When Leah’s maid Zilpah bears Jacob a son, Leah names him Gad. The Hebrew text of Genesis 30:11 records her words in a way that puzzles every new reader of a Hebrew…
Open almost any scholarly commentary on the Old Testament written in the last century and the Hebrew it discusses comes, directly or indirectly, from one family of books: the Biblia Hebraica published…
Of all the manuscript witnesses to the Pentateuch that have survived from antiquity, none is more puzzling, more singular, and more stubbornly useful to the textual scholar than the Samaritan Pentateuch. The…
The Mishmarot are the twenty-four priestly courses into which the Aaronide priesthood of ancient Israel was divided for the purpose of rotating the temple service, and the calendars and lists of the…
In July 1993, an archaeologist named Gila Cook, working on the long running excavation of Tel Dan in northern Israel, brushed the dirt from a black basalt fragment that had been reused…
The oldest large page of rabbinic literature in Europe is not on a Jewish bookshelf. It sits in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, under the catalogue number Vat. ebr. 66, in a plain…
