AJR on Working with Manuscripts

Ancient Jew Review has a two-part review series on Liv Ingeborg Lied and Brent Nongbri's new book on Working with Manuscripts. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like exactly the kind of practical advice I would have liked to have had when I first started working with manuscripts. If you're interested in learning more about working with actual manuscripts, check it out!

Jeremy Smoak on the Ketef Hinnom Silver Amulets

Jeremy Smoak writes for theTorah.com an interesting article on the apotropaic (protective magic) background of the silver amulets from Ketef Hinnom that preserve a version of the priestly blessing with slight differences from Numbers 6.

Marc Michaels on Reconstructing the "Serifed Scroll"

Marc Michaels has produced an interesting Genizah Fragments article on the reconstruction of the famed "serifed scroll," which is likely the oldest Torah scroll in the Genizah collection. Several fragments of this scroll have been preserved, giving us a good opportunity to work on reconstructing the scroll. Marc, a skilled scribe and graphic designer, has done a beautiful job creating a font to imitate the distinctive handwriting of the scroll and reconstruct the missing pieces. While I have often pushed back on the scientific accuracy of these kinds of reconstructions (they sometimes can generate higher subjective levels of confidence that are really warranted), I do find them to be illustrative, probative, and aesthetically pleasing. Congratulations to Marc on the nice article!

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.

Quranic Textual Scholarship

There is a fascinating recent interview with Hythem Sidky on the current state of textual scholarship on the Quran that might be of interest both for its historical significance and methodological parallels with discussions in biblical textual criticism. Sidky argues that there were multiple reading traditions in interaction with a controlling written textual tradition from earliest times. Prior to the Uthmanic standardization of the tradition, we have little manuscript insight into what might have happened, though the undertext of the Sanaa palimpsest sheds some light on alternative versions of Mohammed's companions, which includes different sequences of Surahs and a higher degree of variation (though still restrained and relatively mundane) than in the later manuscripts. The discussion of the interrelationship between oral and written are particularly interesting for biblical scholarship.