In this episode of Hebrew Voices #174, How We Got Our Hebrew Bible, Nehemia brings on the world’s foremost expert in the Masoretic Text, Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar-Ilan University. They discuss how ancient Jewish scribes determined precisely which letters to copy, the primacy of the Aleppo Codex, and Maimonides’s preoccupation with dividing the biblical text into paragraphs.
In this Support Team Study, Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 4, Nehemia and research assistant Nelson Calvillo continue a series on the oldest (nearly) complete surviving Torah. They unpack Nehemia’s lecture at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem presented to the top scholars in the field of Biblical Studies. In part 4, they discuss anomalies in the way scribes corrected this manuscript, the struggles scribes face when copying from one manuscript to another, and even an example of God’s name being erased!
In this Support Team Study, Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 3, Nehemia and research assistant Nelson Calvillo continue a series on the oldest (nearly) complete surviving Torah. They unpack Nehemia’s lecture at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem presented to the top scholars in the field of Biblical Studies. In part 3, they discuss the beautiful traditional layout of the Song of the Sea, the tradition of dots dating back to second temple times, and a secret phrase encoded in most Torah scrolls by Jewish scribes.
In this episode of Hebrew Voices, Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 2, Nehemia and research assistant Nelson Calvillo launch a series on the oldest (nearly) complete surviving Torah. They unpack Nehemia’s lecture at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem presented to the top scholars in the field of Biblical Studies. In part 2, they discuss the spaces dividing the text, their origins dating back to ancient times, and how the manuscript reflects two separate traditions regarding those divisions.
In this episode of Hebrew Voices, Reggie White and the Secret Vault, I share my experiences teaching Biblical Hebrew to the late football Hall-of-Famer Reggie White and tell the story of how we attained special access to a vault holding the actual pages of the Aleppo Codex, an opportunity which Reggie later famously called the best day of his life, better than even winning the Superbowl! Jackie wrote: “What an inspiration this man's faith continues to be to the world... and to me.” Continue reading