Digital Edition of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets

Elvira Martín-Contreras has put up a great website for a digital edition of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. It has often been thought to be one of the earliest Masoretic manuscripts based on its early colophon, though this may actually be a colophon copied by a later scribe, rather than the original. 

RIP Takamitsu Muraoka

Martin F. J. Baasten has announced on Agade the sad news that Japanese Semitist Takamitsu Muraoka passed away yesterday. He will be remembered for his immense impact on the study of the Semitic languages and lexicography, providing critical resources and tools that remain standard reference materials in the field.

Urtext and Variance: The Quest for the Texts of the Hebrew Bible

See the new book out with several interesting chapters on text-critical theory and practice.

_________________________

Urtext and Variance: The Quest for the Texts of the Hebrew Bible

SERIES:

Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology, 122

EDITORS:

Rey F.M., Schorch S., Robert-Hayek S.

SUMMARY:

Focusing at “Urtext”, “Variance” and further fundamental concepts of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible, the thirteen chapters collected in this volume provide analyses of their heuristic potential, methodological problems, and implications, proceeding from evidence emerging from a wide range of Biblical texts and textual witnesses.

New Biblia Arabica Project

The Biblia Arabica group report that they have received funding for a large, 21-year project cataloguing, transcribing, studying, and editing the manuscripts and translations of the Bible into Arabic. They want to make around 8,200 manuscripts readily available to users, which will be a great resource for this oft-neglected corpus. Ronny Volandt and Nathan Gibson are to be heartily congratulated on procuring such substantial funding for a critical humanities project.

Scribes and Language Use in the Graeco-Roman World

Michael Freeman presents a helpful review of a recent volume:

Sonja Dahlgren, Martti Leiwo, Marja Vierros, Scribes and language use in the Graeco-Roman world. Commentationes humanarum litterarum, 147. Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 2024. Pp. 285. ISBN 9789516535206.

The book has an interesting assortment of test cases regarding language interference, the relationship between author and scribe, and quantitative approaches to stylistic analysis.

Contents

Introduction (Martti Leiwo)

1. The language use of the Narmouthis scribes: Foreign language perception and native language transfers. A case study (Sonja Dahlgren)
2. Scribal Revision in the Process of Text Production. A Linguistic Typology of Scribal Corrections in Four Genres of Greek Documentary Papyri (Joanne Vera Stolk)
3. Whose words? Identifying authors in Greek papyrus texts using machine learning (Marja Vierros & Erik Henriksson)
4. Infinitives at Work. Competing Patterns in Early Ptolemaic Papyrus Letters (Carla Bruno)
5. A Bilingual Scribe in Early Roman Tax Receipts from Elephantine (Ruth Duttenhöffer)
6. Documentary papyri as ‘multimodal’ texts. Aspects of variation in the Nepheros archive (IV CE) (Klaas Bentein)
7. Spoken Greek and the Work of Notaries in the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Tommaso Mari)
8. Bilingual Letter Writers: The Verbs γράφω, οἶδα and θαυμάζω in Formulae, Idioms and Collocations (Victoria Beatrix Fendel)
9. ‘You Know Justice and Law and the Kind of Writing of the Notaries’ (Rhet)or(ic)al skills and scribal act in P.Col. inv. 600 (a.k.a. P.Budge), Coptic transcript of a hearing in front of an arbitration council (Tonio Sebastian Richter)
10. Early Medieval Scribes’ Command of Latin Spelling and Grammar: A Quantitative Approach (Timo Korkiakangas)

Greek Paleography Course

A Greek paleography crash course is being offered this summer in Leiden for interested students that is worth consideration. 

Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Biblical Hebrew

VU Amsterdam has made recordings available 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