Digital Library of Hebrew Manuscripts

Israel's National Library aims to digitize and store all of the world's Hebrew manuscripts, beginning with the rare collection held by Italy's Biblioteca Palatina in Parma. The more than 1,600 manuscripts, which were gathered by Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, date from the 13th to the 18th centuries. The National Library is also negotiating agreements with Oxford's Bodleian Library and the Vatican Library. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurian, founded a project to photograph and microfilm Jewish texts. As a result, Israel's National Library currently possesses replicas of 90% of the world's known Hebrew manuscripts in microfilm format ("Ingathering and Digitizing," The Times of Israel, Oct. 14, 2013). The new project aims to digitize the material using the latest technology and to make much of it available online to the general public. It will capture high-definition color photographs as well as photos made with multi-spectral imaging, a process that creates composite photos using a series of filters that capture both visible and invisible wavelengths of light, thus bringing out subtle features of the text that were previously invisible. Prior to the onslaught of anti-Bible evolutionary philosophy in the 19th century, it was commonly believed that Hebrew was the original pre-Babel tongue. For more about this see Thomas Strouse, Scholarly Myths Perpetuated on Rejecting the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament, http://bbc-cromwell.org/Seminary_Articles/Scholary-Myths.pdf

(Friday Church News Notes, October 18, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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