1,628 texts · Page 30 of 34
"My son, hide your money during your lifetime and store it, and until the day of your death, do not give it to your heirs." This is the proverb of the letter Tzadi (צ) in the Alpha...
"Acquire for yourself money, and a good wife, fear of God, and accumulate sons for yourself, even a hundred of them." The letter Kuf (ק) in the Alphabet of Ben Sira delivers a prov...
"Distance yourself from an evil neighbor and do not be counted among their friends." So begins the proverb of the letter Resh (ר) in the Alphabet of Ben Sira. It sounds like a stra...
"Listen, master, to what I am saying. Rest yourself from starting quarrels with your neighbors, and if you see something evil about your friend, do not produce their slander on you...
"Acquire for yourself gold coins, and all money, but do not tell your wife where the money is, even if she is good." And with that, the alphabetical proverbs of the Alphabet of Ben...
Ben Sira's teacher is freaking out. The boy has just rattled off proverbs for every letter of the Hebrew alphabet with the confidence of a seasoned sage, and his educator can only ...
According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, the child prodigy Ben Sira mastered the entirety of human and divine knowledge in just seve...
Ben Sira's reputation for impossible feats of knowledge—like counting every grain of wheat in a bushel at a glance—eventually reached the court of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. ...
Nebuchadnezzar's first question to Ben Sira is bizarre. "How does the rabbit shave her head?" The answer Ben Sira gives connects this strange question to one of the most famous enc...
Nebuchadnezzar's second challenge to Ben Sira is deceptively simple. "Count the trees in my garden." The seven-year-old doesn't even need to look. "Thirty types of trees are in you...
Nebuchadnezzar doesn't believe Ben Sira actually knows what's in his garden. So the king proposes a test. He'll blindfold the boy, march his army past in separate battalions, and B...
Nebuchadnezzar wants to kill Ben Sira. He's just not very subtle about it. "I have a friend I hate," the king says, barely disguising his intentions, "and I want to kill him with f...
Before Eve, there was Lilith. According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, God didn't create Eve first. God created a woman from the sam...
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had questions. Ben Sira had answers. And in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, no question was t...
Nebuchadnezzar noticed something odd about the human body and asked Ben Sira to explain it. Everywhere on the body, each hair follicle holds two hairs. But on the head, each follic...
Gnats live for a single day. They're born, they swarm, they die. New ones replace them. So why do they exist at all? Nebuchadnezzar wanted to know, and Ben Sira had a two-part answ...
King David once watched a wasp devouring a spider while a fool chased them both with a stick. And he complained to God about it. Why create wasps that sting for no benefit? Why cre...
Nebuchadnezzar asked Ben Sira a question that most people wouldn't think to ask: why does an ox have no hair on its nose? The answer, according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira (c. 700-...
In the beginning, the cat and the mouse were friends. Partners, actually. But according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, the...
The Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed between 700 and 1000 CE, doesn't shy away from the crudest questions about the natural world. When Nebuchadnezzar asked why donkeys urinate on on...
The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, tells the longest and wildest origin story for why dogs and cats can't stand each other. It goes all the...
Any cat owner knows the feeling: your cat looks right through you like you're a stranger who happens to operate the food dish. According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed betwe...
Look closely at a mouse's face and you'll notice fine lines running along its cheeks, almost like tiny stitches. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and ...
Watch a raven walk and you'll notice something peculiar. It doesn't strut smoothly like a pigeon or hop like a sparrow. It bobs and sways, almost like it's dancing. The Alphabet of...
The raven has a terrible reputation in Jewish tradition. Thief. Scoundrel. Untrustworthy. And according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 C...
This is one of the greatest trickster stories in all of Jewish literature. According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed between 700 and 1000 CE, every land animal has a correspo...
Jewish tradition holds that a handful of people never died. They walked into Gan Eden - the Garden of Eden - while still alive, bypassing death entirely. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, ...
Buried in a cave near the Dead Sea for two thousand years, the War Scroll (Megillat HaMilchamah, מגילת המלחמה) lays out the most detailed battle plan ever written for the end of th...
The War Scroll doesn't just predict a cosmic battle—it choreographs one. Columns 7 through 9 of the scroll lay out the most elaborate angelic military operation in all of Jewish li...
Columns 11 through 12 of the War Scroll contain some of the most powerful hymns in all of Second Temple literature—victory songs composed in advance for a battle that hasn't happen...
The Community Rule (Serekh HaYachad, סרך היחד), one of the first seven scrolls discovered in Cave 1 in 1947, contains what may be the most startling theological statement in all of...
The opening columns of the Community Rule describe a yearly covenant renewal ceremony that reads like a cross between a monastic initiation and an ancient Israelite oath of allegia...
The Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot, הודיות) are a collection of intensely personal poems found in Cave 1 near Qumran, composed sometime in the 2nd or 1st century BCE. Several of them ...
One of the most mysterious poems in the Thanksgiving Hymns describes a woman in labor during a cosmic storm—and what she gives birth to may be the Messiah. The hymn (column 11) ope...
The Genesis Apocryphon (Apocryphal Genesis, אפוקריפון בראשית), one of the original seven scrolls discovered in 1947, is an Aramaic retelling of Genesis that adds breathtaking detai...
The Genesis Apocryphon transforms Abraham from a terse biblical figure into a vivid first-person narrator. In the Aramaic retelling of Genesis 13, Abraham climbs to a high place af...
The Book of Giants is one of the most remarkable texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls—and it tells a story the Bible only hints at. In (Genesis 6:4), a single verse mentions the ...
While the dream sequence in the Book of Giants gets most of the attention, the scroll also describes something the Watchers tradition in 1 Enoch only mentions in passing: the Nephi...
The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (Shirot Olat HaShabbat (the Sabbath), שירות עולת השבת) may be the most alien-sounding texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls—and that is exactly the point...
The opening song of the Sabbath Sacrifice cycle establishes a structure that would influence Jewish mysticism for centuries: seven heavenly sanctuaries, each governed by an angelic...
At nearly nine meters long, the Temple Scroll (Megillat HaMikdash, מגילת המקדש) is the longest of all the Dead Sea Scrolls. Found in Cave 11, it may date from the late 2nd century ...
The Temple Scroll does something no other Dead Sea Scroll attempts—it rewrites biblical law. And one of its most striking revisions concerns the Israelite king. (Deuteronomy 17:14-...
Every other Dead Sea Scroll was written on parchment or papyrus. The Copper Scroll (Megillat HaNechoshet, מגילת הנחושת) was inscribed on sheets of pure copper, rolled up and hidden...
The Pesher Habakkuk is one of the first Dead Sea Scrolls ever read by modern eyes, and it introduced the world to a revolutionary method of interpreting scripture. The Hebrew word ...
4QInstruction (Musar LeMevin, מוסר למבין, meaning "Instruction for the Understanding One") is one of the longest and most philosophically sophisticated texts found at Qumran. Prese...
The New Jerusalem text survives only in fragments from multiple Qumran caves, but what remains is extraordinary: a guided tour of the eschatological Jerusalem, the city that will e...
The Aramaic Levi Document (ALD) is one of the oldest texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls—parts of it may date to the 3rd century BCE, making it older than most of the books of t...
The second half of the Pesher Habakkuk turns from cosmic prophecy to personal vendetta—and the story it tells has haunted historians for decades. According to the pesher, a figure ...
