Some resources for accessing sources, including manuscripts

a list of online materials that I have found helpful

Hi everyone - I’m still working on my next long thing (it has got considerably longer, as happens, and as a result requires editing to not be a sprawling mess) but I thought that, as I am putting in a fair bit of work using online resources to access manuscripts and the like, I’d put together a list of said resources for others who may not be aware of them - this includes well-known ones that a bunch of you are probably very familiar with, but some may not be, and more obscure ones. I’m not going to share any means for pirating anything, if you’re ok with that there are other ways to find that information.

Finding standard versions of texts is relatively easy, but what about variants? what about manuscripts and tracking the development and change of texts over the centuries?

The first stop, as always, has to be Sefaria. This is the one stop shop for easily accessible online texts. You may roll your eyes at this, and say “of course I know Sefaria is there,” but not everyone knows all of the features, much less uses them. Sefaria is not just a repository of texts, or tool for creating source sheets on a particular topic, nor does it just have extensive cross-referencing (though I know people who haven’t known about that!) so you can select a passage and see what other texts cite it, to find the particular midrash that cites this particular verse but you’re not sure if it’s Pesikta D’Rav Kahana or Rabbati, or maybe Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer - Nor does it just have dictionaries that you can double-click a word to find a definition (or search, including BDB and Jastrow) - it also has manuscripts. In the “resources” panel one can access many high quality manuscripts - solely Codex Leningradensis for much of the Bible, but even when there is only one MS, they are often of very high quality, like CL, or like Kaufmann for Mishnah and Munich and Efurt for Tosefta. And, for Tosefta, Sefaria also has the (unfortunately never completed) Lieberman critical edition, with extensive cross-referencing and variant readings.

But what if you want to look at older material? Then there is the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. The indexing system here for individual fragments is somewhat frustrating (and really needs standardizing) but they’ve got high-resolution full-colour and infrared images of most of the scrolls currently in Israel, and as far as I can tell at the very least all the original plates from the DJD volumes of every scroll. This is also a handy resource for learning to read Hasmonean and Herodian era scripts, provided you have access to a transcription (that last bit is the tricky part). This is very useful for seeing the basis on which various scholars reconstruct particular texts.

But what if you want to find something more obscure, later, or far more specific? Then, aside from academic critical editions and synopses, one is most likely going to need to turn to individual libraries and their digitization projects. Some of those I have used recently are the Princeton Geniza Project, the Bodleian (at Oxford), the JTS Library. Columbia also has an extensive collection digitized on the Internet Archive. Some of these catalogues are infuriating to navigate, but the resources are there. Other libraries that house extensive collections of MSS and of Geniza fragments have their own digitization projects.

Unfortunately, many of the most useful resources require institutional access, but these are some that are freely available.

From Bodleian Library MS. Huntington 511, Job with Arabic translation and commentaries by Saʻadia ben Joseph, Moses ben Samuel Gikatilla ha-Kohen, and an anonymous author. f21r, Job 4:17-19.