Klawans on Forgeries and Authentication

Jonathan Klawans has published a new book Biblical Forgery and Academic Authentication: Persisting Patterns of Guile and Gullibility on forgeries and the sketchy role scholars sometimes play in authentication of unprovenanced materials. It sounds like an interesting read for those who work with manuscripts, because there is a good chance someone will approach you at some point to authenticate a find. I can't even remember how many 3000-year-old Torah scrolls from Turkey have ended up in my inbox. It's good to think about these issues before they come up, rather than after the fact.

From the website:

• Informs, for the first time, on a wide-range of biblical forgery cases
• Focuses on issues relating to academic authentication: why scholars fall for forgeries and the poor arguments used to authenticate
• Introduces forgery studies and proposes a new "scale of authenticity," from 1 to 5

Biblical Forgery and Academic Authentication describes and decries the roles academics have played in the authentication of biblical forgeries. The most notorious recent incident is surely the 2016 publication of thirteen minuscule Dead Sea Scroll fragments displayed in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, quickly determined to be clever forgeries. Additional episodes range from Cyrus Gordon's 1970s authentications of supposedly ancient Hebrew inscriptions discovered in America to more recent trusting re-evaluations of the suspicious Deuteronomy manuscripts offered for sale by Moses Wilhelm Shapira in 1883.

While various articles and books have focused on one incident or another, no recent monograph has tried to grasp the larger, repeating dynamic of academic naiveté among biblical scholars. Nor has any work on forgery to date isolated and illustrated the distinct role played by the academic authenticator-a figure who stands between forgers and skeptics, neither forging nor criticizing the artifacts they encounter and endorse. The inherently controversial act of authenticating unprovenanced finds occasionally coincides with other broken norms (undue secrecy, insufficient disclosures, at times with money involved). This book sheds new light on long-resolved forgery cases, to tip the balance in some open cases, and to expose the ethical and intellectual lapses that permit the current situation to persist and fester.

Reconstructed Koine Pronunciation

Our church has been reading through the Bible this year in a reading plan, and we have now started going through the New Testament. After looking at some possible audio Greek NTs, I started listening to Ben Kantor's readings of the NT books using a reconstructed Koine pronunciation. I had the opportunity to get to know Ben better this September, so it was great to see these resources freely available online and learn more about his reconstruction.

What does a question of Greek language learning pedagogy have to do with OT textual criticism? More than you might think, actually. The reconstructed, historical Koine pronunciation he uses is reconstructed largely on the basis of ancient transliterations and spelling errors in ancient manuscripts, and it is meant to approximate Roman-period pronunciations (with some further developments for consistency). Where this becomes particularly important for our purposes is precisely in that scribes frequently made spelling errors (at least as we normally consider them) that match phonetic interchanges. So if you work with old Greek manuscripts, you will often encounter spelling errors like -τε for -ται that don't actually make sense semantically or graphically, but make perfect sense when you realize scribes pronounced both of these the same way. So even if you don't use this pronunciation in your Greek language pedagogy, it's still very useful to know how scribes actually pronounced things in order to make sense of their manuscripts and spelling practices.

Why aren't Torah scrolls vocalized?

Eliav Grossman has a great short article on why late antique rabbis resisted the vocalization and accentuation of Torah scrolls and instead chose to further distinguish them from the mundane by adding scribal flourishes to several letters. He concludes that it is largely a resistance to contemporary codex culture and the challenge of the Karaites who stressed biblical interpretation over rabbinic tradition.

CEHP Restart

Great news on the grant front! Brent's and my NEH grant to produce a critical edition of the Hebrew Psalms 1-50 has been reinstated, and we are back at work trying to make it happen on a short timeline. For more details, see the blog post on the website.

The Reformers on the Authority of the Septuagint

TCI has a new article out on the Reformers and the authority of the Septuagint that is an interesting read. Apparently, they held varying views on whether/how often the Septuagint could be used to correct the Hebrew text, which eventually morphed into the Protestant/Catholic discussions about the authority of the text in later generations.

New Resource on the Samaritans and the Samaritan Pentateuch

I just learned of a new site/app put together by Osher Sassoni with lots of resources on the Samaritan community, their beliefs, and their tradition of the Pentateuch. Perhaps the most interesting part is that it includes vocalized Samaritan Pentateuch texts as well as audio-recordings of readings of the texts. There is also a large collection of freely available digital images of Samaritan manuscripts. It also includes variants from Von Gall's edition. This looks to be a useful tool for those studying the Samaritans and their biblical texts.

HT Brent Strawn

Der Ursprung der Kaige Rezension

Wolfgang Schütte has published a book on the origin of the Kaige recension. 

Agade gives the following book information:

Wolfgang Schütte, “Der Ursprung der kaige Rezension. Mit einem Nachwort zu Ps.-Aristeas, Aristobul und der Torah”, 2026, 244 pages, BoD-Verlag Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-6957-2708-7 (hardcover, 69 €), ISBN 978-3-6957-0181-0 (softcover, 32 €)

The author unpicks the theological foundation that led to the formation of the kaige recension. It is theTorah, as set out in Deuteronomy and as a coherent narrative comprising the Five Books of Moses. The legal terminology in the Books of Kings holds the key. It reveals three stages in the Jewish history of law within the Books of Samuel and Kings, which also cast the textual history of these books in a new light.

Given that the coherent narrative of the Five Books of Moses did not take shape until the Hellenistic period, the Pseudo-Aristeas letter and the earliest historical accounts of the Mosaic Torah can be reinterpreted.

Contents:

Chapter 1 (hammiṣwah – a forgottenforerunner to the DeuteronomicTorah?) describes how theDeuteronomic Torah came into beingthrough the revision of an oldertextual source, the Deuteronomicmiswah. (A first version waspreviously published in ZAW 137[2025])

Chapter 2 (The Nature of the kaigeRecension. A response to the criticism by Tim McLay) sets out the historical linguistic contexts and the textual-historical foundations for the terms “statute” and “judgement” in the Book of Kings.

Chapter 3 (kaige and the relationship between the LXX and the ANT) incorporates the textual tradition of the Antiochene minority tradition into the interpretation of the LXX kaige recension.

Chapter 4 (Why is the Torah “Law”?) describes the cultural origins of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy forms a discursive space within which all Jewish traditional legal systems must find their place. This task paves the way for the development of the Mishnah and the Gemara. Deuteronomy strives for a unified Jewish nomos as an alternative to the Greek concept of nomos.

Chapter 5 (Pseudo-Aristeas, Aristobulus and the Torah) interprets the Letter of Pseudo-Aristeas as a promotional text for the Deuteronomistic version of what is now a coherent narrative of the Five Books of Moses, and situates the remaining historical textual evidence concerning the Torah within this interpretative framework.