OTTC: A Blog for Old Testament Textual Criticism
This blog is intended to be an outlet for research and questions on the textual criticism of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and related issues.
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew
Old Latin of Esther
Dionisio Candido has published a new book on the Old Latin translation of Esther, a book with one of the most complicated textual histories with numerous distinct versions.
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Friedberg Genizah Fragments in the Ktiv Database
In a recent update that was sent out by the Friedberg Genizah Project, they announced that most of the images and metadata from the site have now been migrated to the Ktiv database, and they are continuing to work on developing new tools and transferring the remaining data.
Monday, July 7, 2025
Scriptura Psalms Resources
Scriptura has just updated their website with exegetical and translation resources on the Psalms. This is an incredibly detailed and helpful site with extensive exegetical and linguistic treatments of many of the Psalms (work still in progress). They also give sustained (if not fully systematic) attention to important text-critical issues in the Psalms. I had the privilege of working with Scriptura for nearly two years and have great appreciation for their contributions to the study of the Psalms. My own exegetical work focused on Psalm 51, and I was also responsible for reviewing most of the grammatical and text-critical analysis done by the individual exegetes. If you haven't used these resources, I highly recommend checking out the website.
Verse Numbering in Hebrew
David Moster has produced a nice video on the role of concordances in the development of verse numbering in the Hebrew tradition.
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Digital Latin Library
I recently learned from Hugh Cayless about the Digital Latin Library, a very useful resource for accessing digital editions of Latin literature. They also provide a number of helpful videos reflecting on the work of textual criticism in Latin literature.
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Radiocarbon Dating, AI, and Paleography
Mladen Popovic et al. have published their long-anticipated article from the ERC project at the University of Groningen entitled The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The article describes the process of extracting new radiocarbon dates from a selection of Dead Sea Scrolls, digitally extracting quantifiable features of their scripts, and building an automated date estimation system called "Enoch." Roughly 80% of the resulting estimates agree with traditional, qualitative paleographical datings, but the results of both the radiocarbon dating and Enoch predictions suggests that several manuscripts throughout the series may well have been earlier than commonly supposed. This research moves the field forward considerably by adding quantitative, computational tools to aid paleographers that are not dependent upon conventional models for script development. In many cases, these new tools support previous approaches by grounding them in more secure dates derived from scientific analysis of the material remains instead of the handwriting style. But the results sometimes challenge conventional wisdom and have potential to help refine our understanding of Hebrew script development in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Congratulations to everyone involved for a job well done and a significant contribution to the field!
For a popular-level news report on the publication, see Science.
*Disclaimer: I worked with Mladen et al. on the project for several years during the foundational stages of the research, but I was not a co-author for this academic article.