Q&A Wednesday: Drew Longacre and the Genizah Psalms

Drew, you visited Cambridge this summer to look at Genizah Psalms fragments – tell us about your project.

I came to examine a dissertation here, and then stayed for an extra week to work on Psalms manuscripts for a critical edition of the Hebrew text of the Psalms for the HBCE (Hebrew Bible: a Critical Edition) series. Brent Strawn and I have funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a three-year project to produce the printed edition, and it will be accompanied by a digital edition too.

Which manuscripts will you include?

Thanks to our colleagues on the Digital Kennicott project, we plan to incorporate many of the manuscripts that were collated in the 1700s by Kennicott, and some additional ones. There are some really interesting early medieval manuscripts that we plan to include – Babylonian manuscripts and Tiberian standard codices – with the goal of representing the broader medieval tradition. By casting our net widely, we hope to be able to do justice to the richness of the medieval tradition, instead of just basing our text on one manuscript.

Is this the first time that the Genizah Bible fragments have been used for critical edition like this?

They have been used before, but inconsistently. The current standard in the field is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. There are occasional references to Genizah fragments, but the references are arbitrary and random. Sometimes you'll see a reference to a Genizah manuscript, but it won’t say which one it is; just that some Genizah manuscript has this different reading. There’s no transparency. That's one of the problems that we are addressing with our project. The digital edition will have a direct connection to the manuscript image from the library in question, feeding through to the transcription and the apparatus. In the apparatus, you will be able to click on the manuscript you want to look at, and it will bring up the transcription there. Then you can see exactly which manuscript it is, and where it's located; there will be a lot more transparency.

How are you choosing the manuscripts you’ll include? Not all Genizah Bible manuscripts are created equal.

Exactly – we have to be selective. There's so much material for the Psalms, especially. The Septuagint Institute in Göttingen has estimated they have about 1300 Greek manuscripts of the Psalms, and we probably have a similar number for Hebrew. The Genizah Unit’s Ben Outhwaite and Kim Phillips are helping us to choose the most interesting and important Psalms manuscripts that would be of most relevance for a critical edition of the Hebrew text. This usually means higher-quality, professional manuscripts, as the common, everyday personal copies have a lot more idiosyncratic features which are not representative of the tradition as a whole. Although we do not have secure dates for a lot of the Masoretic manuscripts, we are also looking for the oldest fragments – manuscripts that will be more likely to explain later traditions rather than be a product of them.

How do the Genizah Psalms fragments compare with other biblical manuscripts from the Genizah?

First, there are a lot of them. Psalms is a very popular book, and it would have been used liturgically too. Second, we have different kinds of biblical Psalm manuscripts: there are a number of professional model copies of the Psalms, personal hand-sized copies for learning the Psalms, and abbreviated manuscripts of the Psalms made as memory devices. The Psalms were certainly appreciated and used by the communities – perhaps more so than other books of the Bible.

Once you’ve identified your manuscripts, what happens next?

We have implemented a Virtual Manuscript Room to produce the digital side of the edition. The manuscripts will be transcribed, using a base text like the Leningrad Codex, edited so that it represents the exact text and format of the Genizah manuscript. After we have transcriptions for all the manuscripts, we can compare all the manuscripts automatically and generate a full apparatus for the final edition. We have a team of volunteers who will help to check and transcribe the manuscripts, and we are providing training on working with manuscripts. When we asked for volunteers we had over 150 people respond, asking to be involved. It is important that they have relatively good language skills. We can teach people to read handwriting and to do the digital encoding, but the language skills are the essential foundation.

How will people then use this edition – there aren’t many variants in good quality biblical manuscripts.

Yes, the medieval fragments are copied so carefully that their differences are relatively small compared to that found in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Bible) and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We're not expecting a dramatic amount of textually interesting variation. The problem has been that, historically, people have only used one manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, and while it is a fine manuscript, it is not perfectly representative of the entirety of the tradition. We're trying to put the field on more solid ground by giving a broader overview of what the medieval tradition looks like, and even small differences can become important for understanding how the tradition has developed.

Thank you for your time, Drew. We look forward to seeing the project unfold!

Drew Longacre is a Research Associate at Duke University. He gained his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK, and was previously the Paleographic Projects Coordinator and Specialist for Ancient Hebrew Paleography at MIKRA Research Laboratory.