A Rare Torah in the Library of Congress - The BAS Library

A Rare Torah in the Library of Congress - The BAS Library

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 2019

The oldest Torah manuscripts survive incomplete and barely legible. But not the scroll sheet acquired recently by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Penned more than a millennium ago, this uniquely preserved parchment represents the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet totally legible by the naked eye. Explore the manuscript’s history and what makes it such a remarkable artifact.

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Footnotes

1. See “>Who Owns the Codex Sinaiticus?” BAR, 33:06.

2. See Larry W. Hurtado, Archaeological Views: “Early Christian Dilemma: Codex or Scroll?” BAR, 44:06.

3. On these two major codices, see Harvey Minkoff, “The Aleppo Codex,” Bible Review, 07:04; Yosef Ofer, “The Shattered Crown,” BAR, 34:05; Yosef Ofer, “The Mystery of the Missing Pages of the Aleppo Codex,” BAR, 41:04; and James A. Sanders and Astrid Beck, “The Leningrad Codex,” Bible Review, 13:04.

4. Paul Sanders, “Missing Link in Hebrew Bible Formation,” BAR, 41:06.

5. Advances in photographic technology now make it possible to read the undertexts of palimpsests, in a way previously not possible. For a prize example, in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo, see Hershel Shanks, “Scrolls, Scripts and Stelae,” BAR, 28:05.

6. See Robin Ngo, “Book of Leviticus Verses Recovered from Burnt Hebrew Bible Scroll,” Bible History Daily (blog), April 9, 2018 www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/hebrew-bible/book-of-leviticus-verses-recovered-from-burnt-hebrew-bible-scroll/).

Endnotes

1.
The vast majority of Codex Sinaiticus is on display at the British Library. Additional leaves are in Leipzig and St. Petersburg and at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai.

2.
On the physical properties of Jewish biblical manuscripts throughout the ages, see David Stern, The Jewish Bible: A Material History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

3.
See the detailed study by Edna Engel and Mordechay Mishor, “An Ancient Scroll of the Book of Exodus: The Reunion of Two Separate Fragments,” Israel Museum Studies in Archaeology 7 (2015), pp. 24-61.

4.
Mordechai Veintrob, “More Fragments of Early Torah Scroll Come to Light,” Genizah Fragments 77 (April 2019), pp. 1-2.

5.
Colette Sirat et al., “Rouleaux de la Tora antérieurs à l’an mille,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 138.4 (1994), pp. 861-887.

6.
Jordan Penkower, “A Sheet of Parchment from a 10th or 11th Century Torah Scroll,” Textus 21 (2002), pp. 235-264.

7. To be sure, the practice of tagin is alluded to in the Babylonian Talmud, but the custom appears not to have taken hold until later.

8.
This article is an expanded version of my online essay “The World’s Oldest Torah Scrolls,” The Ancient Near East Today, March 2018 (www.asor.org/anetoday/2018/03/Worlds-Oldest-Torah-Scrolls).