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.

Handwritten Text Recognition on Gemini

I just saw this old (almost a year old, which is ancient in AI terms) article on Google Gemini 3 essentially solving the problem of Handwritten Text Recognition for historical English documents. The author reports results at or better than skilled human transcribers without fine tuning. An important point, he notes, "We obtained the best performance with temperature (how variable the model’s outputs are) set to 0, media resolution to high (the best image quality), and the thinking level at the minimum of 128." Temperature of 0 ensures maximally consistent results, and the low thinking level stops the model from second-guessing itself. For our Psalms project we have been experimenting with AI-generated transcriptions of Hebrew Masoretic Manuscripts, but none of the systems can as yet accurately read the vowels and accents. We are cooperating with the Open Masorah project to try to use our human-labelled transcriptions to improve performance on this task.

Encoding the Layout of the Leningrad Codex

Charles Loder has started a project to encode the layout of the Leningrad Codex to better situate its text on the page. He's also asking for volunteers to align folios with the help of AI. Recovering the materiality and layout of our manuscripts is a worthy endeavor, and we have tried to do that as well with our transcriptions of manuscripts for Psalms 1-50 (https://hbcepsalms.manuscriptroom.com/manuscript-workspace).

HT Agade

Burning Model Scrolls

True story.... Years ago my poor pregnant wife woke up to the smell of smoke to find me burning model scrolls in the living room. :) I was burning them to observe damage patterns and practice reconstructing fragmentary scrolls.

A new article reports how several scholars have gone and done that as a test case for virtually unwrapping carbonized scrolls like the Herculaneum papyri. They used modern papyrus with lead-laced ink, carbonized it, and then went through the process of scanning and virtually unwrapping it. Their conclusion that metallic additives in the ink make the scanning process more effective and easier is not particularly novel, since we have already observed that in other scrolls like the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll. The real challenge is reading and unrolling scrolls without metal additives. But it does sound like a fun experiment, and the authors hope that it can serve as a ground truth for benchmarking other studies and methods.

James Moore on Elephantine

James Moore has an interview on the Judeans at Elephantine and their socio-religious background that is well worth a listen. He makes the interesting suggestion that Judeans who fled Elephantine might have brought their literary (scriptures?) with them as a possible explanation for their absence from the finds. And I would date the invention of Torah scrolls earlier than he would. :) But all in all fascinating discussion.

The interview is based on his newly published book on the topic.

RIP Hector Patmore

I've just learned that Hector Patmore has passed away while hiking in Scotland. I didn't know him well, but he was always kind and thoughtful in our interactions. Hector made a big impact in our field with his project on the Targums especially. One of his students has prepared a nice tribute in his memory.