Cook, The Targum of Psalms

Edward Cook has revised his 2001 translation of the Psalms Targum.

Aramaic Literature from Egypt and the Levant

Tawny Holm has published a useful anthology of Aramaic literature with English translations. She has done a lot of work recently on P. Amherst 63, an Aramaic psalm collection in Demotic script, so I'm sure she will have lots of helpful observations.

Multispectral Gaze: New Approaches to the Cotton Genesis

Medieval Art Research reports of a forthcoming conference on June 19 at the British Library. The Cotton Genesis is a fascinating example of a beautifully illuminated Septuagint manuscript that is of immense importance for art history, Greek paleography, and the history of the Greek text of the Bible.

From the conference website:

The Cotton Genesis (British Library, Cotton MS Otho B VI) is one of the greatest works of manuscript art to survive from late Antiquity and one of the most tragic casualties of the Cotton Library fire of 1731. New multispectral imaging completed at the British Library and sponsored by the Gina Goldhammer Foundation, has opened exciting opportunities for major breakthroughs in the study of this late-fifth-century artwork. Parts of the texts and illuminations of the Cotton Genesis, damaged in the fire and barely visible to the naked eye, can now be seen through a set of ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light images.

The interdisciplinary conference Multispectral Gaze: New Approaches to the Cotton Genesis aims to celebrate the completion of the digitisation campaign and the discoveries it can generate. By drawing on the manuscript’s multispectral images, leading specialists on late antique book production, art, palaeography, and collection history will provide new insights on the Cotton Genesis.

Program

9.30 – 10.00: Registration

10.00 – 10.10: Introduction

Elena Lichmanova and Emanuel Zingg

10.10 – 11.40: The Cotton Genesis in the Early Modern Period

Chair: Andrea Clarke, British Library

Tom Roebuck, University of East Anglia

The Cotton Genesis in Early Modern English Scholarship

Julian Harrison, British Library

Picture This: Early Reproductions of the Cotton Genesis

Raphaëlle Goyeau, British Library / University of East Anglia

The Lost Cottonian Binding of the Cotton Genesis

11.40 – 12.00 Coffee break

12.00 – 13.00 Text and Palaeography

Chair: Peter Tóth, Bodleian Library

Emanuel Zingg, CNRS, Sorbonne University

The Cotton Genesis’ Place in the History of Greek Palaeography

Reinhart Ceulemans, KU Leuven

The Biblical Text of the Cotton Genesis

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break

14.00 – 15.30 Art of the Cotton Genesis

Chair: Scot McKendrick, British Library (retired)

Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford

The Cotton Genesis and Early Christian Art

Anne-Orange Poilpré, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University

Visualizing Genesis: Image, Narrativity and Sacrality in the Early Middle Ages

Nancy Thebaut, University of Oxford

Looking Back at Lot in the Cotton Genesis

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break

16.00 – 16.45 Key-note Lecture – Coactive Scrutiny: What the Cotton Genesis’ Vulgata Tituli Divulge about the San Marco Mosaics

Herbert Kessler, Johns Hopkins University

16.45 – 17.30 Drinks reception

Organisers:

Andrea Clarke (British Library), Elena Lichmanova (British Library), Emanuel Zingg (CNRS, Sorbonne University)

1,000,000 Views

I just noticed that this blog surpassed 1,000,000 total views last month! I am astounded at how much interest the rather arcane topic of Old Testament Textual Criticism has maintained over the 15 years that I have run this blog. As strange as it may sound, the texts and manuscripts of the Old Testament are a fascinating field of study with an appeal even outside the halls of academia. I haven't posted much original research here, but rather used it as a platform to keep up on current developments in the field and to keep track of useful online resources that I want to be able to find easily. The most popular page/post by far has been my list of Online Digital Manuscripts and Images, with nearly 50,000 views. A huge thanks to those who regularly check in on the blog, and I am happy that others find these resources as useful as I do.

DNA and Codicology

Scientific American has an interesting article on developments in the study of DNA in relation to manuscripts and codicology: How DNA forensics is transforming studies of ancient manuscripts.

T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis

David Smiley has archived his T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis database on Zenodo. He provided the following description via Agade:

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A new dataset is now available that may be of interest to anyone working on inner-biblical allusion, synoptic parallels, or intertextuality more broadly. T'OMIM (תאומים, "twins" in Hebrew) is an open-access collection of labeled parallel passages in the Hebrew Bible, hosted on Zenodo.

Scholars have been cataloging parallelism and intertextual relationships since antiquity. But none of that accumulated work has existed until now in a structured, machine-readable format. T'OMIM was built to fill that gap.

The dataset pairs two corpora of known parallels. The first contains 554 narrative verse pairs drawn from the Chronicles synoptic tradition. The second contains 256 poetic half-verse pairs identified in the biblical parallelism literature. Both corpora are available at two levels of granularity: verse-level paired texts with source citations, and word-level tokens that carry the full ETCBC morphological annotation (part of speech, verbal stem, gender, number, person, lexeme, English gloss, and syntactic structure). Every word in every parallel passage is fully parsed.

For those working computationally, the word-level data can feed directly into natural language processing workflows. For scholars approaching these texts without a programming background, the verse-level files are structured as simple tabular data and can be opened in Excel or any spreadsheet application. Each row is a pair of passages, with columns for the source reference, the text, and the scholarly citation from which the parallel was drawn.

British Library Papyri Images

In 2023, the British Library suffered a cyber attack and has not been able to recover their site. Thankfully, Hugh Cayless just brought to my attention that all of the images as they appeared on the website in June 2021 have now been compiled and made available on Archive.org (also for download). This is a great resource for those trying to find images of BL papyri and ostraca. It's a bit difficult to navigate, but if you know the number of what you are looking for you, you can try to change the URL to bring it up.