New Old Torah Scroll
"ASHKAR-GILSON 2 is a Torah scroll sheet possibly dated before 800 C.E. Unlike the new Library of Congress manuscript, this fragment is not fully legible without the help of modern technologies.
Nevertheless, the oldest complete Torah manuscripts are in the codex form; the most authoritative being the famous Aleppo Codex, dating to about 920 C.E., and the St. Petersburg Codex (formerly, Leningrad Codex), which dates to 1009 C.E.
The few surviving Torah scrolls that are this old are all very fragmentary and almost illegible. It is thus exciting to find a very old, well-preserved Torah scroll, even if it’s only a fragment, a single sheet. One such treasure has recently augmented the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As Gary Rendsburg, Chair of Jewish History at Rutgers University, explains in the November/December 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, this Torah manuscript is the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet fully legible to the naked eye.
Once part of a Torah scroll from circa 1000 C.E., this single sheet of parchment contains part of the Book of Exodus beginning with the Ten Plagues and ending with the first feeding of the Israelites with the “bread from heaven” in the wilderness (Exodus 10:10–16:15). “To our good fortune, and most unusually,” adds Rendsburg, “on the back of the sheet there is a bilingual inscription in Hebrew and Russian.” The inscription tells the fate of the manuscript during the 19th century, when it evidently was brought from the Middle East to Crimea. Eventually, it was presented to a brother of Russian Czar Alexander II."
Marek Dospel, New Old Torah Scroll
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Nevertheless, the oldest complete Torah manuscripts are in the codex form; the most authoritative being the famous Aleppo Codex, dating to about 920 C.E., and the St. Petersburg Codex (formerly, Leningrad Codex), which dates to 1009 C.E.
The few surviving Torah scrolls that are this old are all very fragmentary and almost illegible. It is thus exciting to find a very old, well-preserved Torah scroll, even if it’s only a fragment, a single sheet. One such treasure has recently augmented the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As Gary Rendsburg, Chair of Jewish History at Rutgers University, explains in the November/December 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, this Torah manuscript is the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet fully legible to the naked eye.
Once part of a Torah scroll from circa 1000 C.E., this single sheet of parchment contains part of the Book of Exodus beginning with the Ten Plagues and ending with the first feeding of the Israelites with the “bread from heaven” in the wilderness (Exodus 10:10–16:15). “To our good fortune, and most unusually,” adds Rendsburg, “on the back of the sheet there is a bilingual inscription in Hebrew and Russian.” The inscription tells the fate of the manuscript during the 19th century, when it evidently was brought from the Middle East to Crimea. Eventually, it was presented to a brother of Russian Czar Alexander II."
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