In 1883 fifteen leather strips found by Bedouin in caves on the east side of the Dead Sea came into possession of book and manuscript antiquities dealer Moses Shapira of Jerusalem. These ancient texts were written in Paleo-Hebrew and after painstaking reading and transcription of the faded letters by Shapira,…
Ross Nichols, author of the book,The Moses Scroll published last year, offers the best to date overview of the entire 19th century saga of Jerusalem antiquarian and bookseller, William Moses Shapira, and his sixteen leather strips inscribed in paleo-Hebrew purportedly discovered by Bedouin on the east side of the Dead Sea…
This post from Friday, March 11th is now looking doubtful–as Israel and Turkey are apparently not in agreement. Here is the latest from the Jerusalem Post. We will continue to follow this developing story but the links below to Nichol’s work on the Moses Shapira connections remain as the main point…
One year ago today, February 23, 2021, Ross Nichols published his new book, The Moses Scroll (Horeb Press). I wrote the preface for the book and Nichols and I had been working for over a year on the research, sharing what we uncovered. It was quite an adventure. While I finished my…
Biblical Archaeology Review has just named the “Shapira” Dead Sea Scrolls controversy in its annual “Top Ten” list of Biblical/Archaeological Stories, see full listing here: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/2021s-top-ten-stories-in-bhd/ Two major new books, Ross Nichols’s, The Moses Scroll and Idan Dershowitz’s The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book, came out within days of…
“One of the great puzzles for most researchers of the Shapira Affair is why he spent the final months of his life in the Netherlands. The basic story, oft repeated, is that after the official rejection of his manuscript strips by Christian Ginsburg, the dejected Shapira travelled to Amsterdam, then…
Ross Nichols, author of the best documented and most up-to-date account of the entire Moses Shapira “Deuteronomy” scroll saga, The Moses Scroll, is a must read for anyone wanting to keep current with the latest archival search on the entire Shapira question–along with Idan Dershowitz’s recent published articles and book. I am…
I know many of my readers are interested in the unfolding saga of the Moses Shapira “Deuteronomy” scroll that broke into worldwide headlines last March. If you missed the story or are a bit vague on the particulars, here is a post I did in mid-March, “A Shapira Dead Sea…
I have written quite a bit since February about the controversial Moses Shapira Dead Sea scrolls–sixteen leather strips containing two copies of the final address of Moses to the children of Israel, delivered in the first person. When Shapira presented his manuscripts to the academic world in 1883-with scholars from Germany,…
Many of my readers are aware of the publication of Ross Nichols’s new book, The Moses Scroll that chronicles the whole Moses Shapira Saga and the question of whether or not the 19th century “Dead Sea Scroll” was most likely ancient or a modern forgery. I just received word from Nichols…