Phillips on a textual relative of the Leningrad Codex

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The latest issue of the Tyndale Bulletin carries Kim Phillips’s essay, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex: L17.” According to the abstract,

Samuel b. Jacob was the scribe responsible for the production of the so-called Leningrad Codex (Firkowich B19a), currently our earliest complete Masoretic Bible codex. This article demonstrates that another codex from the Firkowich Collection, containing the Former Prophets only, is also the work of Samuel b. Jacob, despite the lack of a colophon to this effect. The argument is based on a combination of eleven textual and para-textual features shared between these two manuscripts, and other manuscripts known to have been produced by the same scribe.

Phillips acknowledges that definitively linking the scribes of L and L17 isn’t entirely possible. But, he helpfully marshals several different lines of evidence to suggest the strong possibility of this connection.

For the essay’s full text and related links, see the Tyndale Bulletin website. See also PaleoJudaica. HT: Peter Williams.

Organizing Logos

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Logos Bible Software logoOn the Logos Talk blog, Mark Ward has a helpful post about techniques for having a “spring cleaning” in your Logos Bible Software library.

The “collections” tool is especially helpful for associating different resources that logically go together for a given purpose (e.g., multiple sets of Patristic texts, multiple grammars).

The “hide resources” feature can also be quite useful if a base package or collection upgrade was more cost effective but included some resources that weren’t useful. For instance, my library has several different BHS texts, but I’ve hidden some of the older or unmaintained versions so that the main one is always and only the one that appears when I go to open that text in my library.

(I do also perpetually keep BHW perpetually available, having had the opportunity to hear from Kirk Lowery about the occasional differences in how the two editions represent the Leningrad Codex.)

For all of Mark’s reflections, see his original post.

WLC and WHM 4.18 Now Available

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J. Alan Groves Center

The J. Alan Groves Center has released version 4.18 for the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) and the Westminster Hebrew Morphology (WHM). According to the Center’s notice, this update includes:

41 sets of lemma changes, 85 sets of parsing changes, 16 textual changes with an associated change in bracket notes, the addition of the bracket note “]n” (which designates an unusual or unexpected form) to almost 100 words, 24 other changes to bracket notes, 5 other textual changes, and 5 changes to morphological slashes and/or word divisions. Changes to the text are to make the WHM and the WLC conform to the text of the Hebrew Bible found in the Leningrad Codex.

The notice also comments that WLC 4.18 is already available at Tanach.us. For further information about this release, WLC, and WHM, please see here.