A New First Temple Hebrew Papyrus

The Israel Antiquities Authority has announced the exciting recovery of a fragment of a Hebrew papyrus letter from the 7th-6th centuries BCE, that was presumably found in the Judea Desert. The backstory is quite intriguing and worth a read. The papyrus was supposedly also radiocarbon dated to around the same period, which lends strong support to its authenticity (there's not much blank papyrus from that period floating around in Israel). This is one of only a very small number of Hebrew papyri with a claim to come from that early, and those who helped bring it to light are to be congratulated.

HT Gary Rendsburg

Kim Phillips on Memorization of the Psalms in the Middle Ages

Kim Phillips examines an interesting manuscript from the Cairo Genizah that gives insight into medieval practices of memorizing the Psalms.

Newsom on Multiple Versions of the Bible

Carol Newsom has written a nice survey of some of the factors to consider when studying different versions of biblical books for thetorah.com.

HebrewPal Paleography Database

The HebrewPal database now has a public website established, though it does not yet include many manuscripts. It promises to be quite a useful tool once a greater dataset is input.

The project also has a call out for a postdoctoral researcher to work on paleographic descriptions of medieval and early modern Hebrew manuscripts.

Short Intro to BHQ

 David Moster has produced a short video introduction to BHQ.

HT Agade

Online Aramaic Curriculum

I wanted to draw people's attention to the fact that John Ma and Christopher Tulpin put online a useful introduction to Imperial Aramaic as part of their Arshama project.

NLI Torah Scrolls

The National Library of Israel has a nice post with videos about some of their more interesting Torah scrolls.