The Hebrew Bible Manuscripts A Millennium

In The Hebrew Bible: A Millennium, manuscripts, texts, and methods applied in Hebrew Bible studies are considered through time. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo and European Genizot, as well as Late Medieval Biblical Manuscripts are examined.

Books within Books presents some recent findings and research projects on the fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts discovered in the bindings of other manuscripts and early printed books across Europe. This is the second collection of interdisciplinary articles on Hebrew binding fragments presenting current scholarship and its international scope. From the contemporary perspective, the fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts preserved until today, through their numbers (estimated 30,000 fragments, so more than double of the number of the known Hebrew volumes produced in medieval Europe ), the texts they carry (some of them have been previously unknown), the insights into book making techniques and finally their economic impact, are an unprecedented source for our knowledge of the Hebrew book culture and literacy as well as the economic and intellectual exchanges between the Jewish minority and their non-Jewish neighbours.

Comprehensive catalogue of Hebrew Bible fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series, describing 14,679 items.

A collection of essays that examines the Hebrew Bible using the methodology of Rolf P. Knierim of the Institute for Antiquity & Christianity in Claremont, CA.

This volume inaugurates the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the main collection discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran. It continues six biblical manuscripts written in ancient Palaeo-hebrew script, four Septuagint manuscripts, and five hitherto unknown compositions. The Hebrew texts antedate by a millennium what had previously been the earliest surviving biblical codices in the original language, and they document the pluriform nature of the ancient biblical textual tradition before the text became standardized. The most extensive and significant manuscript exhibits the expanded textual tradition that formed the basis for the Samaritan Pentateuch and helps illuminate the historical and theological relationship between the Jews and Samaritans.

This volume charts the extraordinary developments witnessed over the last fifty years, since the chance discovery in 1947 of biblical scrolls in a cave in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. This collection of articles represents cutting-edge research by an international team of scholars. Together, they chart the findings and controversies sparked off by the discovery and publication of some 900 scrolls which have transformed our understanding of the state of the biblical text at the turn of the last millennium. Publication date is November 2002.

Winner of the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity.

In The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium, Phillip R. Callaway presents the most comprehensive survey of the Dead Sea Scrolls since the final publication of the cave 4 fragments. The chapters on editing the Scrolls, on the caves, on the scrolls, and on Khirbet Qumran present the evidence without getting bogged down in older controversies. Callaway discusses the so-called yahad ostracon, as well as a fascinating writing exercise, and the supposed Dead Sea Scroll on stone. Those who desire to know more about the Bible among the Scrolls are offered brief comments on over one hundred readings from Qumran's biblical manuscripts and other biblical texts. In the chapter on the pseudepigrapha and apocrypha, Callaway emphasizes the rich literary production of the mid- to late Second Temple period, with sections on Enoch, Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, a Genesis commentary, the Reworked Pentateuch, targums on Leviticus and Job, the Temple Scroll, the New Jerusalem, an Apocryphon of Joshua, the psalms, various works of wisdom, Tobit, Ben Sira, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and the Greek fragments from cave 7. The chapter on the Community Scrolls deals with the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Community and its appendages, a Hybrid Rule, the Rule of War, the Thanksgiving Hymns, Florilegium, Testimonia, Melchizedek, the pesher commentaries on Habakkuk, Nahum, and Psalm 37, Ordinances, Calendar texts, Some Works of the Law, the Angelic Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and the phylacteries. In terms of the Scrolls and Jewish history, Callaway discusses the text called Praise for Jerusalem and King Jonathan, the Copper Scroll, the documentary texts (which may or may not be from Qumran), the history of the Qumran community, and some similarities to early Christian thought and language. In addition to clarifying discussions of all the works mentioned above, the author hopes that The Dead Sea Scrolls for a New Millennium will help readers understand the Scrolls not as the product of a radical, separatist community, but rather as the literary heritage of many of the greatest Jewish minds that lived in the Second Temple period.