Why aren't Torah scrolls vocalized?

Eliav Grossman has a great short article on why late antique rabbis resisted the vocalization and accentuation of Torah scrolls and instead chose to further distinguish them from the mundane by adding scribal flourishes to several letters. He concludes that it is largely a resistance to contemporary codex culture and the challenge of the Karaites who stressed biblical interpretation over rabbinic tradition.

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

Torah.com on Textual Variation

TheTorah.com has put out a couple of new articles on the text of the Hebrew Bible that might be of interest:

One on Maimonides et al. on the strict standardization of legitimate Torah scrolls and the philosophy behind that.

Another by Juha Pakkala discusses possible theologically motivated editing in the transmission of the Hebrew Bible and the plausibility of omission as an editorial technique.

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.

COMSt 12/1

The COMSt 12/1 (2026) special issue on variants is now out, with discussions relevant here. See especially the article by Shlomi Efrati on variants in the medieval Targum Onkelos tradition

From the website:

Table of Contents

• pp. 1-6: Front matter 
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19338

Criticism of the Variant: Philological Discussions in Traditional Commentary Cultures

eds Alessandro Bausi, Christian Brockmann, and Eva Wilden

• pp. 7-16: Introduction (Eva Wilden)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19344

1 Scribes and Scholars

• pp. 17-42: Glosses, Variants and Corrections in the Margin of Gregory the Theologian’s Manuscripts: The Case of Vaticanus graecus 462 (Caroline Macé)
  DOI:  10.25592/uhhfdm.19346
• pp. 43-58: Copyists Coping with their Models – A Case Study from Mt Athos (Jost Gippert)
  DOI:  10.25592/uhhfdm.19352
• pp. 59-77: Rectifying an Obvious Error – Hints of Text-critical Sensitivity in Late Medieval Targum Manuscripts (Shlomi Efrati)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19356

2 Commentators

• pp. 81-102: Restoring the Text, Conveying the Truth: Criticism of the Variants in Latin Texts during the Middle Ages (Riccardo Macchioro)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19358
• pp. 103-121: ‘There is Also the Reading x’ – the Discussion of Variants in Tamil Commentaries (Eva Wilden)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19360
• pp. 123-144: The Variant is Salient: a Case in the ʾAndǝmtā Commentary Tradition (Mersha Alehegne Mengistie)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19366

3 Variant Versions

• pp. 147-162: Variance in Arabic Poetry, Prophetic Tradition and the Qur’an (Tilman Seidensticker)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19380
• pp. 163-185: Variants, Recension, and Transmission of Khlong Lokkanit (the Thai Version of Lokanīti, the Poem on Worldly Conduct) (Peera Panarut)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19382
• pp. 187-215: Primary Textual Variance of Neidhart’s Songs (1220–1240 ce): The Contribution of Textual Criticism to Cultural History (Anna Kathrin Bleuler)
  DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.19384

Etnachta and Masoretica

Idan Dershowitz has published two different online resources for the study of the Bible:

1. Etnachta (https://www.etnachta.org/) - A site that facilitates study and searching of the Masoretic accents. I haven't poked around much with this one yet.
2. Masoretica (https://www.masoretica.org/) - This site allows you to look up a verse in a number of manuscripts (Hebrew--Masoretic and Samaritan--and Greek). It's a great tool for easily looking up images of manuscripts for a particular verse.

HT Joshua Alfaro 

WebApp for Estimating Scroll Dimensions

David Carr has produced a free web app for estimating the dimensions of scrolls. It allows you to fetch biblical texts and strip them to the consonantal bare bones for help with calculations. By inputting measured data for the text density, you can then estimate scroll length and surface area. I have played around with it a bit, and it looks like it will be a rather useful tool. His methods of measurement and calculation are slightly different from how I have done it in the past, but in principle should yield pretty much the same results when accounting for measurement error.

Proverbs and Amenemope

Bernd Schipper has posted a fascinating article on Proverbs' use of the Wisdom of Amenemope, arguing that the author was familiar with the Egyptian practice of studying wisdom texts over extended periods of time and focusing on the incipit verses of chapters. According to Schipper, Proverbs primarily uses these incipit verses and frames them with terms of chronological sequence that fit an Egyptian scribal context.

Tov on the Original Text of the Torah

Emanuel Tov has published a nice piece on what we can know about the archetype and/or original text of the Torah from the manuscript witnesses.

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:

_______________________________________

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. 

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

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.

Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources

James Moore has released the Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources database. This helpful tool includes an extensive, searchable listing of Aramaic (and other) textual artifacts, map of finds and collections, metadata on each item, transcriptions (with pop-up lexical information), a lexicon, and bibliography. For a particularly relevant example, see his entry for the Elephantine Aḥiqar manuscript. Thanks to James for his hard work and useful contributions!

Textual Criticism is Cool

Michael Kruger argues that textual criticism is now cool among evangelicals, after 30 years of developments in the field. Certainly this resonates with my experience. People love tangible artifacts, and it's a nice entry point for deeper discussions about the text and transmission of the Bible. I wonder how much this applies to the OT though.

McGill Septuagint Virtual Seminar

McGill University's forthcoming The Septuagint in Modern Research Virtual Seminars include the following interesting seminars:

Monday, October 20 2025 | 15:00 BST with Felix Albrecht, on LXX Psalms

Monday, December 1 2025 | 15:00 GMT with Marieke Dhont, on the T&T Clark Handbook of Hellenistic Jewish Literature in Greek

Cox's Annotated Bibliography of Septuagint Research

I just became aware of Claude Cox's annotated bibliography of Septuagint research that he has posted online. It's a great starting point for getting into the Septuagint and finding key resources on various topics and books.

Yiftah 2025 - The Taxonomy of the Legal Document

Uri Yiftah has published online here a very useful book on the typology of language in ancient Greek legal documents.

Public Domain Loeb Volumes

The public domain Loeb library volumes are now all available here. I think they had all been previously available elsewhere, but this is a nice, convenient site to access and download them all.