The Hebrew Bible

Masoretic Text ∥ Judaean Desert manuscripts

תנ״ך

Every verse of the Masoretic Text, and beneath it every Judaean Desert manuscript that preserves the verse, with the reconstructed letters marked. 929 chapters in 39 books; the 262 manuscripts reach 600 of those chapters, in 36 books. Choose a book, then a chapter.

Torahתורה

The five books of Moses. More manuscripts of Deuteronomy survive than of any other book of the Bible: 62 of them reach it.

Prophetsנביאים

The Former and Latter Prophets, ending with the Twelve, several of whose books share a single manuscript.

Writingsכתובים

Esther has turned up nowhere in the Judaean Desert, and neither Nehemiah nor 1 Chronicles is attested in this dataset.

What the stripes show

One mark for each chapter of the book, in order. A filled mark is a chapter some manuscript reaches; a pale mark is a chapter carried by the Masoretic Text alone. The stripes are drawn to a common scale, so the length of a stripe is the length of the book.

Reached is not the same as preserved. A manuscript reaches a verse when the transcription places it there, and much of what the transcription places is the editor’s restoration rather than text preserved in the manuscript. The chapter pages set the supplied letters in grey and in brackets, so the difference can be read off the line; these counts cannot show it.