Transmission
The Silver Scroll
In 1979, excavating a tomb in a cave on the western slope of the City of David, the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay uncovered two small objects that were, at first, easy to overlook:…
Archive
Dead Sea Scrolls
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…
Masoretes
The Thanksgiving Scroll and the Qumran Hymns
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…
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 Mishmarot And The Priestly Courses
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…
Transmission
The DNA of a Book and the Museum of the Bible Forgery Fall-out
In the period since 2018, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. has been at the centre of one of the most consequential episodes of manuscript forgery in the modern history…
Transmission
HBCE and the New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible
Almost every scholarly Hebrew Bible on a library shelf today prints the text of a single medieval manuscript and puts the evidence of every other witness underneath it. The Hebrew Bible: A…
Transmission
Multispectral Imaging and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Multispectral imaging, the technological procedure of capturing multiple images of the same object at narrowly separated wavelengths of light from the visible and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum and combining the…
Scripture
The War Scroll from Qumran
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…
Scripture
The Community Rule and the Yahad of the Dead Sea
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…
Scripture
The Temple Scroll
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…
Transmission
The Isaiah Scroll 1Q Isaiah
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…
Scripture
The Damascus Document
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…
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 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,…
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
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…