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

Dershowitz Kennicott Key

I just saw that Idan Dershowitz has made his Kennicott key available on his website. This is a great resource for looking up information and images of the manuscripts collated by Kennicott in the 18th century.

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. 

The Bible in Arabic

Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala gives a nice illustrated survey of early Arabic Bible translations on the ASOR blog. While pre-Islamic Arabic translations probably existed, the manuscripts that have survived come from the Islamic period and reflect different dialects and base texts, depending on where they were translated.

NLI St. Catherine's Manuscripts Online

The National Library of Israel has uploaded its images of a large number of manuscripts from St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai here. The website also includes some background on the images.

National Geographic Bible Hunters

National Geographic has posted an article Inside the cloak-and-dagger search for sacred texts. While much of it will be familiar to those following the field, the article contains numerous interesting interviews and is a good survey of important developments.

HT Peter Head

Gary Rendsburg on Old Torah Scrolls

Gary Rendsburg writes an illustrated survey of the oldest post-DSS Torah scrolls known today in The World’s Oldest Torah Scrolls. It includes background and discussion of the oldest known fragments and scrolls, as well as images of each.

Mugler's Review of Griffith's "The Bible in Arabic"

AJR has published Josh Mugler's review of Sidney Griffith's The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the 'People of the Book' in the Language of Islam. It sounds like a very interesting overview of important issues that would be well worth further consideration.

HT Agade

Percentage Attestation of the Hebrew Bible in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Everyone who has worked with the DSS has probably had that annoying time when you are working on a passage and check to see if any scrolls have it, only to find that there are none. The preserved remains are often quite meager, though it's extremely hard to quantify precisely how much. But in a fun, informal Facebook conversation, Rick Brannan crunched some numbers on Logos comparing the Lexham DSS Interlinear and Lexham Hebrew Bible modules and suggested that about 33% of verses in the Hebrew Bible have some attestation and about 30% of the total number of words are at least partially attested. Isaiah skews the overall results, such that it would be around 25% by word count if we exclude Isaiah. I initially suspected closer to 10-15% attestation by word, so I was pleasantly surprised by that result. :)