>> Speaker One: From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> Ann Brener: Good afternoon. On behalf of Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division, I would like to welcome you to the Library of Congress. My name is Ann Brener and I'm a specialist in the Hebraic Section, here. In the spring of 2017 the Library of Congress learned of an extraordinary treasure on the market, a most unique ancient fragment from the biblical book of Exodus. Just how unique you'll soon be hearing from our wonderful speaker. Now, the story of Exodus is one of the foundational texts of Western culture. It is woven into the American narrative about freedom and it resonates powerfully in American history. What could be more fitting, therefore, than to bring this ancient treasure to the Library of Congress, the national library of the nation founded on the principle of freedom? Now, the ancient treasure is actually here. And for this, we have to thank the people at the helm of the library, the ones who make the actual decisions on what to apply and what not. It takes more, I think, than the power of the purse to make to make that kind of decision. To quote from the Hebrew poem written by a grateful poet to this patron over thousand years ago in medieval Spain, ''It also takes heart and mind and eye.'' And those words remain true, today. Please, join me, therefore, in making Mary-Jane Deeb, the Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division, Beacher Wiggins, Director of Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access. And most of all, I think, Helena Zinkham, Director of Collections and Services. Without them we wouldn't be celebrating here to today. Today's speaker also played an important role behind the scenes. It was to him I turned when I first learned of this ancient scroll sheet and it was his expertise that guided me during the crucial first stage. For this reason, I am delighted, doubly delighted, that the day has finally come when we can welcome Professor Rendsburg into our meeting room and hear more about our new treasure. In addition to being my own special consultant Gary Rosenburg, Rendsburg is a distinguished professor of Jewish history at Rutgers University, where he holds the Blanche and Irving Laurie Chair in Jewish History. He is author of seven books of Biblical literature and language and about 170 articles. That's one seven zero. Perhaps, his best-known book is the Bible and Ancient Near East co-authored with the late Sirus Gordon. He has also produced two DVDs for The Great Courses program, one on the book of Genesis and one on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is, also, my former professor from graduate school in Cornell and I'm sure is grading me today. So, please join me in welcoming Professor Gary Rendsburg. ^M00:03:20 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:26 >> Gary Rendsburg: Thank you, very much, Ann, for those very kind words and it's such a pleasure to be here. And as you said, you use the word celebrate. It's truly a time of celebration to reflect on the arrival of the remarkable 1,000-year-old Torah scroll sheet now here at the Library of Congress. The oldest Torah scroll sheet in the world, complete Torah scroll sheet in the world, legible to the naked eye. And that's how we can define this treasure that is now part of the Library of Congress. So, let's discuss how it got here, why it's so important, why it's so unique. And just join me for this amazing beautiful ride. So, as Ann said, in last spring in May 2017, she sends me an email and she says, ''Would you please take a look at this catalog?'' And these are some snippets from this catalog, ''The 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop''. And they have offices in both Brooklyn, New York and Stevenson just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. ''And please, go look at this item, in particular, on page 129 of the catalog.'' Which I do. And I read it and it says, as you can see here, that is all we have to go on. Exodus 1010 through 1615. Complete biblical scroll sheet in Hebrew. A Torah scroll panel, Middle East, tenth or 11th century. And then, a more detailed description. So, when I see this, and I'll just close, give you a close-up on the most important part of the catalog description. I know, immediately, what it is. And that's because those of us who work in the field of Hebrew manuscripts keep track of these things. We certainly know where they are in public collections, in libraries, and museums around the world. And even, those which are in private hands, we learn about from time to time. This one was sold at Christie's in London in 2001, and therefore, I knew about it. But, of course, one never knows who the seller is or who the buyer is in such private sales through auction houses like Christie's or Sotheby's and other such institutions in the world. Now, that I know exactly what it was. I had a pretty good hint, but of course, I didn't remember Exodus 1010 through Exodus 1615. I said that must be it, but I of course went back and double checked. And indeed, it was. Why did I know about it? Because, kudos to Jordan Penkower, my colleague at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Who, in the year 2002 was able to publish a very long detailed article about the Torah scroll sheet that is now here at the Library of Congress. Which, is to say when it was for auction in London in 2001, he as an expert in medieval Hebrew manuscripts and Torah scrolls, in particular, was invited to come to London to study it. So, that it would, at least, be available for the scholarly world. Even though, it would, presumably, be purchased by somebody in private hands as it was. And here is his description of it, exactly, with the same verse, of course, that are in the catalog that we just looked at. And the same dimensions and so on. So, I confirmed by looking at Jordan Penkower's article from 16, at that time, 15 years ago, that this was, indeed, the sheet. And I emailed Ann back. I think her email to me was something like, ''Is this real? Is this possible? It's too good to be true.'' Is was something like that. And I wrote her and I said. ''This is real. Buy it if you can.'' Right. Obviously, okay. And Ann already described the processes, of course, at any institution, as we are all aware of, of how such a thing needs to be obtained. Pardon? Right. So, it was purchased by the library, as we've just heard. Now, Penkower published, when he published his very long, detailed article, two very not so good photos from, I don't know if he took them with his own camera. Black and white photos from 2001, 2002. And these are the two photos he took, and a portion of column three and a portion of column five, just to give us a sense. Now, column five is the important one because as you see there, while the entire text, and I'll show it to you, again, in a few moments, is written out in prose. The portion of Exodus 15 known as the Song of the Sea, Shirat Ha Yam in Hebrew, is written out in poetry. And it's a very well-known poetic structure that biblical text of Torah scrolls of this particular song use the poetic style. So, there you see some of the handwriting up close and personal in images which are taken some years ago. I also went online and there is an auction record of it from this invaluable.com, which you know, tracks and keeps records of all these things. And again, a very poor image on the left, upper left there you can see of the of scroll fragment. And on the right, a bilingual inscription. I'll show you a better copy in a moment. In Russian and in Hebrew, which gives us a clue as to where it was, at least in the year 1863. And that inscription is on the back of the scroll. We learned from this that it was presented by a man named Shelomo Beim. He was the Karaite Hazzan in the Crimea in the 19th century. We know about him from other sources, as well. So, the Karaites are a group of Jews who do not follow the rabbinic approach. The rabbinical movement which arose in the second and third century CE has been the dominant one down to the present day. And all modern streams of Judaism, orthodox, conservative, reform, Reconstructionist, and now in the 21st century renewal, and everything else. ^M00:10:01 Are all based on the rabbinic system as laid out by the classical rabbis in the Mishnah and the Talmidim. The Karaites have a totally different approach to Judaism which does not use the rabbinic system and they are a community of about 50,000 down to the present day. Mainly in Israel, but once upon a time, spread out throughout the near East. Large communities in Egypt and in parts of Russia, as well, both in Lithuania and next door. So, this is Shelomo Beim, a Karaite Hazzan, leader of the community. I think Hazzan in the Karaite system means less the canter in the synagogue, but rather, the one who oversees the community. And he gave it as a gift to the Grand Duke Constantine, the brother of Czar Alexander II in the year 1863. That's what the Russian and Hebrew inscription says. And again, I'll show you a better image of it. We now have a very good image of it. So, it tells us, of course, that this was there in 1863. How did it get there? According to Penkower and everybody else who's seen it, it is written in the Middle East. That is to say, we can tell handwritings and we divide them up into various geographical zones. Spain, which we call the Sephardic one. Europe which we call northern Europe, the Ashkenazi one. The Yemenite one. And this would be the Middle Eastern hand. And it's pretty clear that it came from the Middle East. And based on other elements, we know that it's about 1,000 years old. So, when I was here in the October 2017, it was still, it had recently arrived and it was still in its original glass case and frame. So, you get a sense of what it looked like. And notice all the folds. Right. So, how do we retrace the story of this scroll? Now, here you see it today after it's been stabilized, not yet fully conserved, but at least stabilized. And I want to draw attention to Yasmeen Khan, who is sitting here in the front row. Conservator here at the library, who will be doing further work on the conservation of this scroll in the weeks and months ahead. And here you have the before and after. Now, I wrote before and after conservation because I thought this was already conserved, since it looked so good to my eye in the photograph. But there Yasmeen tells me no, it hasn't, actually, been conserved, yet. This is the stabilization. And at least, to get it onto display, since it was on display in the Great Hall, here at the library back in March and April. So, it looks like to me, to my eye, that this has already been put on the ironing board, don't try this at home, and smoothed out. But apparently, there is still much more work to be done. So, what are all the folds about? Right. I mean, would, we have no knowledge. We don't know how it got from Russia in 1863, where it was, to London in 2001. But, I'll come back and give you, at least, some speculation about that. Here's the note. You can see it much better now. Mainly in Russian, but, also, some Hebrew and giving us the details, which I described a moment ago. On the back of the, of the back of the scroll. It's on the back of the scroll, correct. Yeah, okay. Now, let me introduce you to one of the great figures of Jewish history, Abraham Firkovich. He was a hakham, a wise man, literally. Meaning a leader of the Karaite community. And those are the years of his life. You can see that he lived to be almost 100 years, no, to be almost 90 years old. And he is famous because throughout the 19th century, he left Russia where he was from, Karaite community that I just described. And he traveled throughout the near East, and he brought back manuscripts by huge numbers. Treasures of things that had never been seen before by European scholars, as he traveled throughout the Middle East in the land of Israel and in Syria and in Egypt. And wherever he went in what was then the Ottoman Empire. And he brought back these great treasures. The most famous treasure he brought back is the so-called Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete copy of the Bible that we possess. With a colophon, a inscription that, giving us information about the scribe and the year. Written in the year 1009 CE in Tiberias in the land of Israel. And he brought that back to Russia and it is now in St. Petersburg. When it was published during the 1920s, the city, of course, was called Leningrad. So, people call it the Leningrad Codex. I think we should start calling it St. Petersburg Codex because the city has reverted to that name. And of course, I do think there's some irony in the fact that years from now, centuries from now, or millennium from now, everybody will have forgotten who Vladimir Lenin was. And his name will live on only in the name of the Leningrad Codex. How's that for an irony? Of course, my students have already forgotten who Lenin was. They think maybe was one of the Beatles, but they don't even know anything about that. Okay. So, Firkovich brings the Leningrad Codex back and it is deposited in the Imperial, what was then the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg, where resides to the present day. And presumably, he is the one who must have brought the scroll that we have here at the Library of Congress, scroll sheet back. We don't know that for sure, but his fingerprints, quotation mark. Right. His fingerprints are all over such a document that came from the Middle East to Russia by a Karaite, into the Karaite community. And then, given to the royal family, as I indicated. And then, presumably, somebody got it out of the Russia, folded it up, smuggled it out. We don't know, and just winds up, hence, the fold. And it just winds up in London and it's on the auction market in the year 2001. That's as much as we can say about this, about the history of this, of this document. Now, as I mentioned before. Oh, and it was on display, as I said, right next to the Gutenberg Bible in the Great Hall. And so, I've tried to recreate a little bit of that for you right here, with the image of the Great Hall, of the scroll sheet, and the Library's Gutenberg Bible. So, and I know it was visited by many people while was on display, just not too far from where we are seated, right now. And therefore, we can say based on, although, I will demonstrate this in the second part of my talk, still. That this is, to repeat, the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet legible by the naked eye. As we'll see in the second half, there are other Torah scroll sheets that are incomplete, that are torn, that we can read. Or maybe they are complete but we can't read them, they are so black. So, this gains the title of the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet legible by the naked eye. Now, you can't see it on these images, but on the far left and on the far right are the remains of thread. So, remember that a Torah scroll sheet, this is five columns, is written on a single sheet of parchment. And then, they are sewn together to create the large scroll with a large rolled text. So, this would have been a single sheet connected to Genesis and the beginning of Exodus on the one end. The rest of Exodus and all of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the five books of the Torah on the other end. What happened to the rest? Why was the single sheet preserved? Right. These are the things we simply don't know. But I think because of the special nature of Exodus 15, which we'll talk about just a moment the poem that you see here, that this would have been the most treasured part of the of the Torah text. Now, here is Exodus 15, as we just said. And with that, we have an interlude and I'm going to invite Joseph Englesberg up here to join me, because we're going to do a little bit of a dramatic presentation for you. ^M00:18:10 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^F00:18:12 ^M00:18:21 So, for those of you who do not know the text of Exodus 15, we'll give you just a little bit of it in English and just a few lines in Hebrew. And so, this is the story of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, where the Israelites have left Egypt in Exodus chapter 12. And a few chapters later, chapters 14 and 15, Pharaoh's had a change of heart and he sends the army out to track down the Israelites in the wilderness. And they are trapped with the Egyptian army behind them and the sea in front of them. And you all know the story. The sea split and the Israelites passed through and the Egyptians in pursuit, the sea comes back together and drowns the Egyptians. Safely on the other side of the sea, the Israelites sing this text. And it is, according to those of us who work on the history of the Hebrew language and Biblical texts and dating them, it is, probably, the oldest Hebrew composition that we possess. Exodus Chapter 15, the Song of the Sea. And it goes like this. >> Joseph Englesberg: I will sing to the Lord for He has triumphed gloriously; the horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea. >> Gary Rendsburg: The Lord is my strength and my song and he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise Him; the God of my father and I will exalt Him. >> Joseph Englesberg: The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name. >> Gary Rendsburg: Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea and his choice officers are sunk in the Sea of Reeds. >> Joseph Englesberg: The floods cover them. They went down to the depths like a stone. >> Gary Rendsburg: Your right hand, oh Lord, glorious in power; your right hand, oh Lord, shatters the enemy. ^M00:20:04 >> Joseph Englesberg: In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries. You sent forth your fury; it consumes them like stubble. >> Gary Rendsburg: At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the flood stood up in a heap, the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea. >> Joseph Englesberg: The enemy said, I will pursue. >> Gary Rendsburg: I will overtake. >> Joseph Englesberg: I will divide the spoil. >> Gary Rendsburg: My desire shall have its fill of them. >> Joseph Englesberg: I will draw my sword. >> Gary Rendsburg: My hand shall destroy them. >> Joseph Englesberg: You blew with your wind, he sea covered them.; they sank as lead in the might waters. ^M00:20:44 [ Foreign Language Spoken By Gary Rendsburg ] ^M00:20:50 >> Joseph Englesberg: Who is like you, oh Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? >> Gary Rendsburg: And then we're skipping the second half of the poem. We've read the first half of it. Until we get to the final line. ^M00:21:06 [ Foreign Language ] ^M00:21:08 >> Joseph Englesberg: The Lord shall reign forever and ever. >> Gary Rendsburg: And at this point the text returns to prose. The last two lines of the text that you see here, on the image, return to the block prose. And we get these little, you know, few more verses about what's happening. And then, in a remarkable stroke of early iron age egalitarianism, the Hebrew text is voiced through the women who were with the Israelites. And with that, we ask Rachel Becker, of the Library staff, the Hebraic Division, to join us to play the female role because the text then says in prose, then Miriam, Miriam, not Miriam. Dressed appropriately. Then, Miriam the Prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand and all of the women went out after her with timbrels and dancing. And Miriam sang to them. >> Rachel Becker: Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea! >> Gary Rendsburg: Isn't that beautiful? ^M00:22:09 [ Applause ] ^F00:22:15 ^M00:22:17 Thank you, Joseph. Thank you, I almost called you Miriam. Thank you, Rachel. You're so good. Now. Okay. Well, we'll do it from here. I just wanted to point out a few features of this scroll beyond the poetry. Those of you who know Torah scrolls, this predates some of the features of the Torah scroll that you would be familiar with. First of all, there is no left justification. Let's remember that Hebrew is written from right to left. So, the columns begin right justified. But there is no attempt to do any left justification. Some lines are slightly shorter. Some lines are slightly longer. Can everybody see that, right? Today in the Middle Ages, the, the tradition of doing right and left justification developed. And so, this predates that. How did scribes the Middle Ages do right and left justification? What if the long, what if the word was just too long or too short? What they do? Right. They created what we call dilated letters. They would take certain Hebrew letters like the final Mem and stretch it out a little bit. Right. So, they would make, they would get that right and left justification. You don't see that here. Seven letters of the Hebrew alphabet in Torah scrolls have little crowns on them. Little tittles on tops of the letters, which we call in Hebrew, ''Tagin'', meaning crowns. And these, this scroll has none of that. Right. This doesn't, this doesn't, this is not part of this tradition, yet. The last and the third feature, which you do, which you see on medieval and contemporary scrolls but you don't see here. There is a tradition to begin each column with the letter Vav. The commonest letter in the Hebrew alphabet is the word Vav, the letter Vav, which means the word and. And it is so ubiquitous that you could actually space out a Torah scroll and have every single column begin with that letter Vav. What is known in the Hebrew tradition is [foreign language], the Vavs of the columns. That is not present here, either. So, no left justification, no tagin, the little tittles, and no attempt to lay out the text so that the letter Vav is at the beginning of each column. That is not to be found here, at all. And of course, that helps us understand that this is a very ancient scroll, unlike all other, all other scrolls. Also, and it's almost impossible to see on this image, there are occasional corrections. Now, according to Jewish law and, certainly, as practiced by later scribes from, let's say, the 13th century onward, if you make a mistake you have to scrape it off or just restart. Or just, you know, can't use it for liturgical purposes in the synagogue. This apparently either ignores that or it's too early to be participating in that legal tradition or custom. And therefore, you do see occasional corrections here. Some of them by, one of them in particular, adds a word. I don't think you can see it, but right up here between the lines, I mean, I can't see it myself, either, at the moment. There is a, the Hebrew word Et, which doesn't have, really, any meaning, but note, it informs you that the direct object is to follow, is inserted between the two lines. Because the scribe had left it out and went back and made that correction. And there's occasional other corrections. One in particular, down here and be, towards the bottom of the third column, where they change the paragraphing system. You can see white spaces which are indicating paragraphs. So, that was changed, as well. I do, I should point out that the only place you see the left justification is in the five prose lines in the upper left before the song, and the five immediate lines below the song. Right. Before the, above and below the poem. There, you can actually see the left justification, as well. Okay. Now, how do we know that this is really the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet legible to the naked eye? Let's take a tour of that in the second half of this presentation. So, the Ein Gedi Synagogue on the shore of the Dead Sea dates to the fifth to the seventh century. It was excavated in the 1970s. Here is a photo of the way it looks, today. It's outdoors. You just see the foundation. How many of you have been to Ein Gedi? Anybody? Worth a stop at this beautiful synagogue with a mosaic floor. There's a tent over it now, to protect it. And this is the area, this is the area of the Torah scroll arc where the, would have been a wooden box of some sort where the Torah scrolls would have been kept. The Torah scroll niche, the Torah niche. And in the excavations in 1970 this was found there. A burnt scroll. And it is charred, it is impossible, must been an accidental fire. It is impossible to open up. The archaeologists just kept it. Right. They just kept it for 45 years thinking one day technology will catch up. And it did, because we now can do CT scanning, which you probably think was invented for medical purposes but was really invented to read old Torah scrolls. And here it is with the Bruker Skyscan model 1176. Right. We have the 1076 at home. That's why we couldn't do it ourselves, but we figured out how to do it with somebody. And they did the scroll. And here is, of course, it would be black ink on white parchment, but you all know because x-rays know these other kinds of MRIs and CT scans. It's always inverted imaging. And so, here is the white letters. And turns out to be the beginning of the book Leviticus. This was done in 2015. Next year, the scientists went deeper into the scroll and this is still not been, this is digitally unrolled. Do you realize what we're talking about, here? Right. Digitally unwrapped, digitally unrolled. And here is now the complete scan of the scroll beginning Exodus chapters one and two. You'll notice that there is a blank sheet right in front of it, here. Okay. That tells us that this scroll was not a complete scroll of Torah, but only the book of Leviticus, right. Because, otherwise, you'd see the end of Exodus before the beginning of Leviticus. That it was just Leviticus or, maybe, the second half of the Torah. Maybe, they used Genesis and Exodus in one scroll, and then Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy in another. But this tells us this is the beginning of the scroll and it starts with Leviticus. By the way, what do we call that blank sheet at the beginning? A protocol. Protocol in Greek means ''that which was glued to the beginning of a scroll''. And in the Greek manuscripts or, even in other later manuscripts, they would give you notations as to what's in the scroll. So, you would just have to open up. That was the protocol. Okay. The Jews didn't do that. They just put a blank sheet there and didn't write on it because you just opened up and saw it was Leviticus. And yes, there's a Lincoln penny there because the scientists who did the work were at the University of Kentucky. And so, this is there homage to their most famous native son. At the Weitzman Institute in Israel, it was subjected with a small piece to a carbon-14 test and dated to around 300 CE. And since the synagogue is from the sixth or seventh centuries, this informs us that a scroll was in use for several centuries. Three-four centuries inside the synagogue for liturgical purposes. And here it is, digitally unwrapped now, with the black on white. ^M00:30:02 Why we can play with the images. Thank you, scholars and scientists, who help us out with all of this work. This one is, actually, in the US. This is known as Ashkar-Gilson number two. It's in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. And I mentioned his name because he has been a great benefactor of book culture and is a member of the Library of Congress Board, if I'm not mistaken. So, he is a major player in preserving books and manuscripts from centuries ago. This is already digitally enhanced. You can almost read nothing of this. It so happens to, also, be Exodus 15. And you can see the scroll, the layout of the poem that we just read and that we just saw on our scroll sheet, you can see it here. But A, it's not complete, and B, it's almost impossible to read anything. I've been to the Duke library. I've seen this with my own eyes and, trust me, there's not much that one can actually read by looking at it, unless you have some digital enhancement as you see here. Here it is much more legible with some more photo enhancement. Dated to around 700 CE. And there's an up close, really beautiful. There is this scroll, which was in London. How I got to London, we don't know. It was in London for up until the 20th century, and maybe even into the 21st century, at Jews' College, a training ground for rabbis in the UK. And it's a complete sheet, as you can see here, of seven columns. And it includes a large chunk of the book of Exodus leading up to the material that we just saw on the previous one. Now, this, also, cannot be read with the naked eye. And it's now, also, in the private hands of a collector. It has recently been determined that these, actually, come from the same sheet. In other words, the paleography experts who worked on this, the handwriting experts, which we call paleographers. Now, tell us that the London scroll on the right, which is now in private hands, and the Ashkar-Gilson scroll fragment at Duke, come from the same scroll with a column in between missing. And this was recently worked out by Edna Engel and Mordechay Mishor in Jerusalem. Ashkar-Gilson collection has another scroll fragment. Nobody can read anything on this. But, welcome to photography. Via multispectral imaging we can read everything, now. And for those you who can read Hebrew, this is a version of the Ten Commandments in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 5. Isn't it great to live in the 21st century where we can do all this? Here are some scroll sheets that are, also, very old and are legible to the naked eye. They all come from the Cairo Genizah, Cambridge University Library collection. TS stands for Taylor-Schechter. This one is dated to around 800 CE by the paleography experts. It's from Genesis, but again, not complete. How do we know it's a Torah scroll and not something else? Because the back is blank. Right. Eventually, the Jews will move from the Torah scroll to the Codex, which is the forerunner of the modern book, where you will have writing on both sides. But all the things I'm talking about here are scrolls and scroll sheets. Jews will continue to use the scroll format down to the present day in the synagogue for liturgical purposes of the reading of the Torah and the book of Esther. But we can take images. We have images of these things to show us both the recto and the verso. Here is a close-up of just one small passage from Genesis chapter 14. And I've given you the Hebrew text in its later Masoretic apparatus, so you can comparison there. This comes from the same scroll, as well, as the paleographers now tell us. Also, in Cambridge, but the earlier parts of Genesis. A small fragment from around a century later. There it is blank. From a century later, we have another fragment. See the seam? So, you can see how these would have been two sheets that were sewn together. These are all in Cambridge, originally found in the Cairo synagogue, the Cairo Genizah collection. Blank on the reverse. One of the best examples of what can happen in the history of manuscripts is this. Does everybody see what this is? Well, you can't come to a Library of Congress talk in this division and not hear the word palimpsest. This is a palimpsest. Right. It is an old Hebrew manuscript where the ink was scraped off, and then a later scribe wrote Greek on top of it. That, we call palimpsest, where things were scraped off. This is from the used parchment market. And we have so many palimpsests from the early Middle Ages because it was hard to get parchment. It was a lot of work to get parchment. And so, you would have to constantly rework it and scrape it and if you did need it anymore. We don't know how this Hebrew text was no longer being used. But it's a Torah scroll underneath that was, somehow, got into Christian hands and a Greek writing scribe wrote this. This is in the Medici Library in Florence. And actually, we now know from further analysis that six different handwritings are on the under text. And it dates from more or less the same time as the new Library of Congress Torah scroll sheet. And here we are, again. And so, with that little review we can say, as I said a moment ago, that the Library of Congress Torah scroll sheet is the oldest sheet in the world legible to the naked eye. Right. Do we have all the material? Yes. Can we read them? Either, they are fragmentary, so they're not complete. Or we can't read them and we only need photo enhancement to read them. So, here you have it to repeat the oldest Torah scroll sheet legible to the naked eye, dated to around 1,000 years ago. To conclude, if you're interested where our oldest Torah scrolls complete are to be found. And I've shown you very fragmentary material. The oldest complete Torah scroll in the world is in the University Library in Bologna, recently dated with carbon-14 testing to the year 1190 CE. And if you go back, in this case, about 800 years, the plus minus of carbon-14 dating is really only about a 50-year window. So, it dates from 1140 to 1240, or something like that. In the C-14 test, we split the difference and we come out with 1190. And you can see the image has been opened up again to the same text that we've been looking at, the poem of Exodus 15. Next time in your Bologna, go to the library and request to see this treasure. That's the oldest complete Torah scroll we have. What about the oldest complete Torah scroll still in use? Not in a university library, still in a synagogue? At the northern Italian city of Biella, where there is a small Jewish community not far from Milan, this Torah scroll is still in use. It's in the synagogue. And it, also, was recently dated by carbon-14. You need just a little fleck. So, they took a little fleck of the parchment. In the old days you'd need huge amount, but today you can just take like a fingernail worth. And both of these tests were conducted, by the way, at the University of Illinois, which has the best C-14 lab in the U.S. And why they send it to the U.S. instead of someplace in Europe, I don't know. But they were both done here. And this one is from 1250 CE. Again, a plus minus of a bit in either direction. But it gives you a sense of how old these manuscripts are, how old and how well preserved the ink on the parchment can be. Because these were done with the best quality materials. Right. These were sacred texts, which the scribes and the communities who used them knew would last for centuries. And they took the best parchment and the best ink and had the best scribal hands. And together, produced these magnificent documents, including the one that is now here at the Library of Congress. Thank you. ^M00:38:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:38:58 [ Inaudible Comment ] Questions. >> Ann Brener: Thank you, Professor Rendsburg, for an absolutely wonderful lecture. If I can turn the tables on my professor, I'd give him an A plus. We have a display of rare booked for you and an opportunity to see this incredible scroll sheet in the back. And we have a surprise for you, also. We have Senior Conservator, Yasmeen Khan, who is going to speak in front of the scroll sheet and tell us about all the conservation work they're going to be doing. But first, we have time for a few questions. So, I'll return the microphone to Professor Rendsburg. >> Gary Rendsburg: Thanks. Questions. Yes, sir. >> Speaker One: This sheet is, obviously, now a fragment, but it is missing a corner. I was wondering what the criteria [inaudible]. >> Gary Rendsburg: I would put an asterisk there and say it's missing a few words in the upper right-hand corner. Yeah, right. To me, this is complete. ^M00:40:00 This is as close as we're going to get to, to complete. So, you know, it's a technicality. Yes. ^M00:40:06 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:40:09 I'm sorry, I didn't hear your question. ^M00:40:11 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:40:14 Oh, I'm sorry. I should have said this, I should have said this. Thank you, for reminding me. The question is, ''Are there any scrolls from the BCE period?'' And I neglected to mention, it's very important. Thank you. The Dead Sea Scrolls are our oldest, amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls are our oldest biblical documents. Right. So, the Dead Sea Scrolls date from the third, second, and first centuries BCE. Found in the 1940s and 1950s in the caves of Qumran on the shore of the Dead Sea. And there are 800 plus documents, and 200 plus documents are biblical manuscripts. Okay. So, yes, we do. Including Genesis, Exodus, all of them. Only one complete scroll and that's the book of Isaiah. All the others are fragmentary. In fact, very fragmentary. But thank you, for that reminder. Yes. ^M00:41:03 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:41:05 Oh, there is one version of Exodus 15 amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thank you. But it is not written in the poetic style. It is written in block as if were just prose blocking. It would have been read as poetry. Right. The oral reading tradition always would have read it in a poetic fashion. That would have been since his time composition. But it's earliest manifestation in a graphic form in writing, amongst the scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's not laid out like you see here. Okay. And by the way, I didn't give you the Hebrew term. I should give it to you, we. The Jewish tradition has always kept track of all of these things with different terms. And in Hebrew, this is known as a [foreign language]. Half brick over brick, brick over half brick. Everybody see the layout? Right. This is the way of brick, bricklaying goes. Okay. You don't just pile up bricks this way. It's better to pile them up half brick, brick, half brick, brick, etcetera. Yes. ^M00:42:09 [ Inaudible Comments ] ^M00:42:24 Okay. So, the question is about the use of the Codex and the use of the Masoretic material. So, Masoretic is the English word based on the Hebrew word Masorah, which means tradition. There were a group of scholars in the ninth, in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, mainly in Tiberius, Israel, but also, other places including Babylonia. Who created a graphic representation of the vowels, the punctuation, and so on. For those of you don't know the Hebrew system that we're looking at here, there is nothing here but the 22 letters of the alphabet, which are all consonants. There are no vowels. There are word breaks, space between words. But there's no punctuation. It doesn't tell you when a word ends. So, this is the graphic and it's the oldest, the way to write the Hebrew language in graphic form. There was an oral reading tradition, which I alluded to a moment ago, where the tradents, the oral readers, knew how to intone a text. They knew the vowels, they knew the accents, they knew the punctuation, and so on. Just like you know these things from memory. So, the Masoretes created a graphic system to represent all that in the eighth-ninth century. And at the same time, we have the Jews adopting the Codex, which was prior to that associated with Christianity. As I said, writing on both sides. So, all of that is happening, you're correct, in the eighth and ninth centuries. And the Leningrad Codex, which I mentioned, is the tenth century. The other famous one is the Aleppo Codex from the ninth century. And, sorry, the tenth, Aleppo Codex is tenth century. The Leningrad Codex is early 11th century. But it doesn't have an effect on Torah scroll. Because for liturgical purposes, religious tradition is the most conservative aspect of any society; Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, it doesn't matter. And so, since the Jews have been writing out Torah scrolls going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, to the Ein Gedi Synagogue scroll that I showed you, and so on. That was unaffected by the shift to the Codex, as it is down to the present day. Yes. Yeah. ^M00:44:32 [ Inaudible Comments ] ^M00:44:50 Okay. The question is about the kosher-ness of the scroll, whether it's legally or holotically [phonetic] fit for the use in the synagogue. And so, as I alluded to, we, our working assumption is that all of these scrolls were for liturgical purposes. Certainly, by this time, study scrolls, reading scrolls were in the form of the Codex, which was a great leap forward for book culture. And the, had the apparatus of vowels and punctuation, and so on. So, these only have been used for liturgical purposes. There can be no doubt about that. Okay. Yes. Last one. Yeah. One last question. Go ahead. ^M00:45:34 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:45:36 Where can you learn about Mister Firkovich, the great Karaite collector? Well, the biography of him still needs to be written. But there is a Wikipedia entry. I mean, if you asked me where to go I would say, of course, go the start with the Wikipedia entry. Do know anybody who's written on Firkovich beyond that? I think that would be the best place to go, would start with Wikipedia. There may be a few references there. The Encyclopedia Judaica. ^M00:46:03 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:46:05 Yeah. The Encyclopedia Judaica would have a entry. And the old Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, probably, has a good entry, as well. And that's available free and online. Okay. ^M00:46:16 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:46:19 Someone has to. Okay. A fascinating character and I don't know how much of his life we can put back together at a distance of, you know, a century and a half, now. But he, we all, we are all in his great debt for the work that he did. But, yes. And so, he may have a hand, he certainly has a hand in all the material that's in Saint Petersburg, today. And he may even have had a hand in this text, as well. Thank you. ^M00:46:48 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:50 >> Speaker One: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.