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. 

Scriptural Vitality Book Panel

The Oxford Interfaith Forum has posted a video recording of a book panel reviewing Hindy Najman's new book on Scriptural Vitality.

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 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

Corpus of Samaritan Coinage from the Persian Period

The Israel Numismatic Society reports a new publication on the corpus of Samaritan coinage from the Persian period. 

Abstract:

This two-volume monograph, A Corpus of Samarian Coinage, is the definitive culmination of a major research program focused on the Samarian minting authority during the Persian period. This coinage represents one of the earliest and most varied official coinages produced in the southern Levant, likely being issued from the late fifth century BCE until after the Greco-Macedonian conquest.

While building on earlier scholarship, this work offers a substantive re-evaluation of the field. It incorporates numerous newly identified coin types and establishes a robust, modern classification system essential for all future study. The data is based on an exhaustive, multi-year study of the entire corpus of known Samarian issues, involving the global examination of specimens in publications and in public and private collections.

Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible

Starting in just a few days, the Museum of the Bible will be hosting an exhibition in Washington, D.C., of the Dead Sea Scrolls in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority. The scrolls will be available in three different rotations:

NOVEMBER 22, 2025–FEBRUARY 2026

First Rotation

• 4Q7 Genesis(g)
• 11Q10 Targum Job
• 4Q83 Psalms(a)
• 4Q210 Astronomical Enoch(c)
• 4Q434 Barkhi Nafshi(a)
• 4Q491 War Scroll(a)
• Eschatological Commentary A
• 11Q20 Temple Scroll(b)

FEBRUARY–MAY 2026

Second Rotation

• 11Q5(a) Psalms (Great Psalms Scroll Fragments)
• 4Q27 Numbers(b)
• 4Q111 Lamentations
• 4Q264 Community Rule(j)
• 4Q448 Apocryphal Psalms and Prayer
• 4Q274 Tohorot A (Purities)
• 4Q400 Non-Canonical Psalms A
• 4Q530 Book of the Giants(b)

MAY–SEPTEMBER 2026

Third Rotation

• 4Q58 Isaiah(d)
• 4Q197 Tobit(b)
• 4Q130 Phylacteries C
• 4Q534 Birth of Noah(a)
• 4Q218 Jubilees(c)
• 4Q275 Communal Ceremony
• 4Q258 Community Rule(d)
• 4Q271 Damascus Document(f)

Anneli Aejmelaeus, RIP

I just learned from Kristin De Troyer that Prof. em. Anneli Aejmelaeus passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. Anneli was a kind and generous colleague, mentor, and friend, who supervised my first postdoctoral position at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in "Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions" at the University of Helsinki. In addition to a long and industrious career as a professor at the University of Helsinki, she also served as Professor in Septuagint at the University of Göttingen from 1991-2009. She has the further distinction of being among the first women ordained for ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in 1988.

Anneli's life work on the Septuagint culminated in preparing the Göttingen critical edition of the Old Greek text of 1 Samuel, one of the most interesting and challenging textual situations in the study of the text of the Bible. She began working on the edition of 1 Samuel during her time in Göttingen and was able to submit the completed edition for publication soon before her death. Anneli also recently reached out to me to help finalize an edition of an important papyrus of 1 Samuel that we had worked on together in Helsinki with our team at the Centre of Excellence, and she was able to see a near-final version of the edition before she passed. Christian Seppänen and I will finalize that in the near future and see it through to publication on her behalf.

Anneli is survived by her husband Lars. I remember my first time meeting Lars and Anneli at the International SBL meeting in St. Andrews and walking back to our hotels together, thinking they were a very sweet couple. My family will always fondly remember times spent with them, especially picking wild blueberries at their cabin. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Anneli for many long hours discussing issues of textual criticism that have helped shape who I am as a scholar today.

ἐν εἰρήνῃ ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτὸ κοιμηθήσομαι καὶ ὑπνώσω, 

ὅτι σύ, κύριε, κατὰ μόνας ἐπιʼ ἐλπίδι κατῴκισάς με. (Psalm 4:9, LXX)

When Was the Psalter Compiled?

I just saw that my recent article in the Bible and Interpretation has been published on the question of "When Was the Psalter Compiled?" It summarizes and pulls together arguments for the date of the collection of the proto-MT Psalter that will appear in greater detail in my monograph forthcoming in 2026 in the FAT I series.

“Love in Lines: Syntax, Metre, and Stanza in Akkadian Love Literature” - Daniele Borkowski (University College London)

Daniele Borkowski (University College London) just delivered a fascinating online lecture regarding “Love in Lines: Syntax, Metre, and Stanza in Akkadian Love Literature.” His presentation focused on the poetics of the compositions, which has many parallels with biblical Hebrew poetry. I include my summary notes here of things that seem particularly relevant for comparative study of the poetry of the Bible.

______________________________

Summary of the Poetics of Akkadian Love Poetry of the 2nd Millennium:

• The standard Akkadian verse (he called them lines) has four stresses divided by a caesura that distinguishes two lines (he called them stichoi). Prepositions are not generally factored into the stress-count. The 2/2 pattern is the most common and comprises about 40% of the verses. Next common is 2/1 (about 20%) and 1/2 (about 10%). These three metrical patterns with four or three stressed syllables account for about 70% of verses. He has not yet studied whether any of these metrical patterns apply consistently across full compositions.
• Clausula accadica: This principle says Akkadian lines should end in a trochee (stressed followed by unstressed syllable); about 71% follow this rule, a consistency which supports the existence of meter in the corpus.
• About 70% of the time there is one syntactic clause per line (his stich, I think).
• About 75% paratactic clauses vs. 25% hypotactic; compositions usually have a mix, rather than consistently one style.
• In paratactical constructions, the verbs are often put at the beginning and end of the verse (sim. chiasm).
• He frequently sees patterns in the semantic relationships between lines (stichoi within a verse; e.g., parallelism), including reiteration, contrast, elaboration, et al.
• A substantial proportion of tablets from the 2nd millennium (8/32) draw horizontal lines (usually plus blank space) to indicate stanza breaks. The number of verses per stanza varies both within compositions, but the most common is around 5-6 verses per stanza. Most commonly, these indicate changes of speaker.
• The graphic distinction between different lines (stichoi) is standard practice from the 1st millennium onward, but rare in the 2nd millennium. Most commonly, each verse is written on a single row with a blank space/caesura in the middle separating the lines (stichoi), such that the tablet looks like it is laid out in two columns. One Neo-Babylonian tablet actually further differentiates each accentual unit within each line. Sometimes scribes misdivide the lines within a verse.