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…
Archive
Ben Naphtali
Transmission
The Samaritan Pentateuch
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…