Etnachta and Masoretica

Idan Dershowitz has published two different online resources for the study of the Bible:

1. Etnachta (https://www.etnachta.org/) - A site that facilitates study and searching of the Masoretic accents. I haven't poked around much with this one yet.
2. Masoretica (https://www.masoretica.org/) - This site allows you to look up a verse in a number of manuscripts (Hebrew--Masoretic and Samaritan--and Greek). It's a great tool for easily looking up images of manuscripts for a particular verse.

HT Joshua Alfaro 

WebApp for Estimating Scroll Dimensions

David Carr has produced a free web app for estimating the dimensions of scrolls. It allows you to fetch biblical texts and strip them to the consonantal bare bones for help with calculations. By inputting measured data for the text density, you can then estimate scroll length and surface area. I have played around with it a bit, and it looks like it will be a rather useful tool. His methods of measurement and calculation are slightly different from how I have done it in the past, but in principle should yield pretty much the same results when accounting for measurement error.

Proverbs and Amenemope

Bernd Schipper has posted a fascinating article on Proverbs' use of the Wisdom of Amenemope, arguing that the author was familiar with the Egyptian practice of studying wisdom texts over extended periods of time and focusing on the incipit verses of chapters. According to Schipper, Proverbs primarily uses these incipit verses and frames them with terms of chronological sequence that fit an Egyptian scribal context.

Tov on the Original Text of the Torah

Emanuel Tov has published a nice piece on what we can know about the archetype and/or original text of the Torah from the manuscript witnesses.

DNA and Codicology

Scientific American has an interesting article on developments in the study of DNA in relation to manuscripts and codicology: How DNA forensics is transforming studies of ancient manuscripts.

T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis

David Smiley has archived his T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis database on Zenodo. He provided the following description via Agade:

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A new dataset is now available that may be of interest to anyone working on inner-biblical allusion, synoptic parallels, or intertextuality more broadly. T'OMIM (תאומים, "twins" in Hebrew) is an open-access collection of labeled parallel passages in the Hebrew Bible, hosted on Zenodo.

Scholars have been cataloging parallelism and intertextual relationships since antiquity. But none of that accumulated work has existed until now in a structured, machine-readable format. T'OMIM was built to fill that gap.

The dataset pairs two corpora of known parallels. The first contains 554 narrative verse pairs drawn from the Chronicles synoptic tradition. The second contains 256 poetic half-verse pairs identified in the biblical parallelism literature. Both corpora are available at two levels of granularity: verse-level paired texts with source citations, and word-level tokens that carry the full ETCBC morphological annotation (part of speech, verbal stem, gender, number, person, lexeme, English gloss, and syntactic structure). Every word in every parallel passage is fully parsed.

For those working computationally, the word-level data can feed directly into natural language processing workflows. For scholars approaching these texts without a programming background, the verse-level files are structured as simple tabular data and can be opened in Excel or any spreadsheet application. Each row is a pair of passages, with columns for the source reference, the text, and the scholarly citation from which the parallel was drawn.

British Library Papyri Images

In 2023, the British Library suffered a cyber attack and has not been able to recover their site. Thankfully, Hugh Cayless just brought to my attention that all of the images as they appeared on the website in June 2021 have now been compiled and made available on Archive.org (also for download). This is a great resource for those trying to find images of BL papyri and ostraca. It's a bit difficult to navigate, but if you know the number of what you are looking for you, you can try to change the URL to bring it up. 

Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Biblical Hebrew

VU Amsterdam has made recordings of their recent workshop on Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Biblical Hebrew. Papers include:

1. Sutskover, From Parts to Whole

2. Mollo, Language of the Body

3. Atkinson, Adnominal Possessive Constructions

4. Robar, Poetry and Cognition

5. Van Loon, Mataphors We Live By?

6. Van Hecke, Cognitive Lexical Semantics and the Return of Diachrony

7. De Blois, Discovering the Semantic Structure of Biblical Hebrew

8. Locatell, Cognitive Linguistics and Textual Criticism

9. Mushayabasa, Conceptual Blending in Matthew's Fulfillment Quotations

When Was the Psalter Compiled?

I just saw that my recent article in the Bible and Interpretation has been published on the question of "When Was the Psalter Compiled?" It summarizes and pulls together arguments for the date of the collection of the proto-MT Psalter that will appear in greater detail in my monograph forthcoming in 2026 in the FAT I series.

Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources

James Moore has released the Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources database. This helpful tool includes an extensive, searchable listing of Aramaic (and other) textual artifacts, map of finds and collections, metadata on each item, transcriptions (with pop-up lexical information), a lexicon, and bibliography. For a particularly relevant example, see his entry for the Elephantine Aḥiqar manuscript. Thanks to James for his hard work and useful contributions!

Textual Criticism is Cool

Michael Kruger argues that textual criticism is now cool among evangelicals, after 30 years of developments in the field. Certainly this resonates with my experience. People love tangible artifacts, and it's a nice entry point for deeper discussions about the text and transmission of the Bible. I wonder how much this applies to the OT though.

McGill Septuagint Virtual Seminar

McGill University's forthcoming The Septuagint in Modern Research Virtual Seminars include the following interesting seminars:

Monday, October 20 2025 | 15:00 BST with Felix Albrecht, on LXX Psalms

Monday, December 1 2025 | 15:00 GMT with Marieke Dhont, on the T&T Clark Handbook of Hellenistic Jewish Literature in Greek

Cox's Annotated Bibliography of Septuagint Research

I just became aware of Claude Cox's annotated bibliography of Septuagint research that he has posted online. It's a great starting point for getting into the Septuagint and finding key resources on various topics and books.

Yiftah 2025 - The Taxonomy of the Legal Document

Uri Yiftah has published online here a very useful book on the typology of language in ancient Greek legal documents.

Public Domain Loeb Volumes

The public domain Loeb library volumes are now all available here. I think they had all been previously available elsewhere, but this is a nice, convenient site to access and download them all.

Conference on the Ezekiel Papyrus

The recording of a recent conference on the famous Chester Beatty Ezekiel Papyrus (Ra 967) has been uploaded here. They have lots of interesting material about the purchasing and history of the papyrus, as well as some discussions of its format and text.

Johnson and Wagner on Material and Scribal Features of Greek Bookrolls

William Johnson and Nicholas Wagner have published their curated dataset of material and scribal features of early Greek bookrolls (3rd cent CE and earlier) at https://ancientbooks.papyrology.org/. They expect to supplement this and add their work on early codices in 2026. This is an extremely valuable database for those interested in the study of early scroll formats and scribal practices. Congratulations to both for seeing their hard work come to fruition, and thanks for making it so easily accessible!

Sikes' Catalogue of Early Greek Psalms Fragments

Ryan Sikes has uploaded an updated version of his catalogue of early Greek Psalms fragments here. This is a very helpful resource with links to images and editions, which I use regularly.

Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew

I just saw that Aaron Hornkohl has published an open-access book on Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew, where he argues that we can see diachronic indications even within the corpus of Classical Biblical Hebrew. He suggests that, on balance, the Pentateuch reflects an earlier stage of Hebrew than the early prophets et al.

Rezetko et al. have published a critical review of the book, where they repeat their criticism of "linguistic dating" as unwarranted, given the complex formation and transmission histories of the texts. In the comments, Ron Hendel provides his own response to the review, which is generally supportive of Hornkohl's approach (if not all of the details of his argument).

I would not claim to be a historical linguist, and I haven't spent a lot of time in the literature. But I guess as a textual critic I have some stake in the argument. I agree, in principle, that it is not safe to just uncritically assume the MT text form for linguistic analysis. Scribes sometimes did update orthography or other linguistic features, and critical comparison of different versions sometimes helps us to restore earlier states of the text. That said, it would be wrong to imagine that updating on the scale of the (in)famous 1QIsa-a was common, when it is rather the exception to the rule. I see very little evidence of any kind of systematic linguistic leveling or updating in the tradition. Most ancient biblical manuscripts are much more conservative in their copying approach, and in general I have been impressed by the way the distinctive linguistic profiles of different works are so well preserved despite many centuries of copying. This is evident in orthography, morphology, lexicon (including loanwords), and even syntax. And bringing in traditions like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Samaritan Pentateuch is unlikely to change much, since these are precisely where we find most of the linguistic innovations, in contrast to the generally more conservative MT. My prediction is that systematic text-critical work will help reverse some linguistic changes and provide improved clarity at points, but that improved resolution will more often reinforce the more established diachronic observations of language typologists than undermine the typological distinctions.

On the question of redaction, no one doubts that many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible had long and complex editorial (pre-)histories. But there are many disagreements and uncertainties on the details of those histories, and I, for one, am hesitant to rely on proposed redactional histories as firm ground truths for dating the texts of the Hebrew Bible. If faced with a choice, I would personally much rather bring historical linguistic typology to bear as an independent control on redaction-critical models than the reverse. Linguistic typology is less dependent upon complex and subjective literary readings, and it is more easily pegged to materially datable evidence in the form of ancient inscriptions and comparative evidence. Of course, this is not to discount dating based on literary criteria entirely, and sometimes internal indications of date may be the best criteria. But too much of the tradition of dating the biblical books has been based on highly ambiguous literary data and is heavily dependent on very speculative redaction-critical theories. So I welcome attempts like Hornkohl's to provide more objective controls on literary-critical speculation. Whether the details of Hornkohl's particular arguments hold up or not remains to be seen.

HT Agade

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.