Virtual Unrolling and Deciphering of Herculaneum Papyri by X-ray Phase-Contrast Tomography

Continuing on the theme of the day of X-ray technology, an article entitled "Virtual Unrolling and Deciphering of Herculaneum Papyri by X-ray Phase-Contrast Tomography" has recently been published online (thanks to Elvira Martin-Contreras for point it out). It is a very interesting case of the application of this technology to the deciphering of the carbonized Herculaneum papyri, which has been a quickly developing field of study. Michael Segal recently showed me in Helsinki some very impressive results of the digitally scanned and unrolled carbonized Leviticus scroll from the Ein Gedi synagogue. The potential for studying such scrolls with non-destructive methods is opening up a whole new world for modern textual scholarship, and those who are working in this field deserve our gratitude.

"European Genizah" and X-Ray Technology

This week I spent a good amount of time with several medievalists in Aix-en-Provence discussing Hebrew Bible manuscripts, which I will write about in more detail in the near future. Many were studying the so-called "European Genizah," which is actually an ironic name for collections of fragments found in the bindings of books from the printing era. Old manuscripts were frequently divided up and their material reused to strengthen and support the covers and bindings of printed books, and there are a number of projects going on nowadays to recover these fragments from their bindings and gain insight into European Bible manuscripts in the late medieval and Renaissance periods. So far, there have been about 900 Hebrew biblical fragments from the 12th-15th centuries recorded in the project Books Within Books, which is a vast treasure trove of material evidence. I always like to point out such numbers to New Testament colleagues who generally seem to be under the illusion that the massive amount of data in NTTC is somehow unique... :)

On a related note, I would also like to point out an article cited by Peter Gurry on ETC that reports the use of macro x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF) to read metallic inks without having to disassemble the book bindings in which the fragments have been placed. It's always nice to have your cake and eat it too, so if we can study the fragments and preserve the bindings, that is quite an important development.

Strasbourg Conference on the Samaritan Pentateuch and Pre-Samaritan Texts

Michael Langlois has organized a conference on the Samaritan Pentateuch and pre-Samaritan Qumran texts on 26-27 May in Strasbourg. It looks very timely and interesting, and I wish I could be there. If you are in the area and have the time, it sounds like they have a very good line-up of contributors.

Updates to List of Online Manuscripts and Editions

I recently updated my list of online manuscripts and editions, which can be found on the tab above or here. If you know of any helpful resources not listed, please do comment, and I will try to incorporate them as time permits.

Museum of the Bible Job Posting

Christian Askeland has posted a job as research projects coordinator at the Museum of the Bible here. It sounds like a good opportunity for anyone with good skills working with manuscripts and ancient languages, as well as administrative skills to help organize projects to make the holdings more widely available.

Digital Paleography Postdoc

I am happy to announce that I just accepted a postdoctoral research position at the University of Groningen with Mladen Popović as part of the ERC project, "The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls." See the job description from the call for applications below:

This Postdoc subproject is embedded within a larger research programme titled The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls, funded by the European Research Council. The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to shed new light on ancient Jewish scribal culture and the making of the Bible by investigating two aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography: the typological development of writing styles and writer identification. The combination of new C14 samples and the use of computational intelligence as quantitative methods in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity, focusing, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied and on the scripts and languages that they used.

The goal of the Postdoc subproject is to describe the processes of and developments in three to four centuries of copying the biblical manuscripts found in the Judaean Desert in relation to palaeographic dating and writer identification. The major research question is how variant forms and editions of biblical manuscripts can be correlated to palaeographic dates, to identification of writers, as well as other variables such as scribal practices and different find-sites. Previous scholarship has explained textual variety in terms of chronological developments or sociological differences, or both, based on traditional palaeographical dates, or on models of a Qumran scribal practice, and generally on a smaller sample of manuscripts. On the basis of a database of all substantial biblical manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, the Postdoc researcher will select one more confined group of manuscripts (most probably either Deuteronomy or the Psalms), and qualitatively analyse the differences between the manuscripts as well as in relation to the authoritative text forms of the later traditions, in order to plot such variants against the developing time and the different find places and correlating these not only to traditional text-typologies of text, but also to occurrences of rewriting and so-called Fortschreibung, and to the various scribal practices.

The postdoc will work together with a PhD at the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering Institute (ALICE), headed by Prof Lambert Schomaker, with experts from the Center for Isotope Research at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, headed by Prof Hans van der Plicht, and with a PhD and student assistants at the Qumran Institute of the faculty.

A Hebrew Exodus Manuscript in Arabic Script (BM Or 2540)

Browsing the digitized manuscripts of the British Library today, I happened across a wonderful manuscript that I had never seen before, and I thought it might be worth highlighting. BM Or 2540 is the remnants of a Karaite codex containing the Hebrew text of Exodus 1:1-8:5 in Arabic script. The Karaites are well-known for their intense interest in the text, and it is possible that some--or even many--important Masoretes were Karaites. Dated roughly to around the 10th century, this manuscript is a rather early example of a Masoretic codex, probably earlier than the famous Leningrad Codex. The Hebrew text is written in Arabic letters in black ink (with differences in orthography), with Tiberian vowels added in red and accents in green. It is quite a beautiful and interesting example of the flexibility of Jewish scribes with unique combinations of scripts and languages. Not only were many different languages written in Jewish/Hebrew square scripts, but also Hebrew language text could be written in other types of scripts.