If Herschel Hepler, associate curator of Hebrew manuscripts at the Museum of the Bible, hadn’t been searching Google Images in April 2016, he probably would not have found an image of a Hebrew manuscript in the museum’s collection which was in Afghanistan at a time when it was supposed to be in Egypt.

If not for that revelation—which raised enduring questions about international law, diplomacy and ethics—the private museum in Washington likely wouldn’t have conducted tests on the Afghan Liturgical Quire and learned that it is not only older than previously thought but the oldest known Hebrew book.

The discovery, and Hepler’s communication with the photographer who documented the book when it was in the possession of an Afghan ruler, led the museum to enlist the scholar Malachi Beit-Arié as research lead on the project. Beit-Arié pushed the museum to conduct dating tests in 2019 of four parts of the manuscript, which indicated that the book is eighth rather than the ninth century. (Beit-Arié died at 86 last October.)

“If we hadn’t expanded the project around Malachi, I doubt any other scholar would have the confidence to argue for us to do four radiometric dating tests,” Hepler told JNS. “The logical progression of this seems obvious now, but it didn’t occur to me.”

Such tests degrade small portions of the parchment. “There are a lot of manuscripts and codices that have a date range and radiometric dating, and they took one sample from one page, and they say, ‘Well. Here’s the date range,’” Hepler told JNS. (A codex is a bound book, a manuscript is a hand-written text and a quire refers to 24 same-sized sheets of paper.)

“We took four samples across the structure of the manuscript, including what we know is the last thing added,” Hepler told JNS. Tests revealed that even the newest part of the book had the highest probability of being before the year 780, during which there was a large “solar event” that presented “a hard line on the carbon in the atmosphere,” the curator said.

At a reception at the Museum of the Bible on Sunday, which drew officials from the U.S. State Department, former Afghan officials, Afghan Jews who live in the United States and Washington Jewish leaders, the notion that the oldest Hebrew book had endured and found its way to Washington was frequently cited as a “miracle.” The book is on view (through Jan. 12) in the exhibit “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest Hebrew Book.”

Hepler is certain that the manuscript is the oldest known Hebrew book, but mysteries abound about the object and its makers. There are several hands present, which are clearly educated people, with the exception of someone who was practicing her or his aleph-bet on part of a page, according to Hepler. But a portion of the Passover Haggadah is upside-down, texts, including liturgy for Sukkot and for Shabbat, are truncated, spelling is inconsistent and the manuscript contains Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Persian.

“I think there were two quires that had independent lives from this manuscript in the eighth century. One the Haggadah. One the beginning of a poem” about Sukkot, Hepler said. “Someone came into possession of these two different quires of four sheets of parchment and wanted to combine them, and I think this is the person who wrote the Sabbath morning prayers.”

That compiler “had all of his liturgy in one booklet, for some reason, but he didn’t know how to combine quires, so he stacked them instead of sewing them next to each other,” Hepler told JNS.

The square manuscript, which is about four and three-quarter inches on each side, also has erasures, including where the author of the poem ran out of room and removed two lines of text from the Haggadah, which extended onto a new page (or folio).

“I think that’s why it’s upside down because the Haggadah is first. The blank sides of the bifolios were wanted in a specific location in order to write 19 pages worth of Sabbath morning prayers,” Hepler said. He noted that the manuscript isn’t missing any pages, as the Haggadah is incomplete and the poem barely doesn’t finish. 

“Based on where everyone is stopping, usually in the middle of a folio, there is no folio missing,” he told JNS. “I think this is a personal book of prayers, potentially someone traveling along certain routes. A merchant. Someone very educated. All of the scripts are very experienced hands.”

Book resistance

“This is the most exciting find that has appeared in a millennium,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, told JNS.

“It is the first bound, Hebrew book. It’s the first codex that we have,” Liberman Mintz said at the Sunday reception. “We have Hebrew books in scroll format from the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the first century before the Common Era going until the second century of the Common Era.”

But then—prior to the identification of this manuscript—there were seven centuries of a “quiet” period until biblical codices started appearing in the 900s.

“We knew of nothing, although we did know from secondary sources in the Geonic period that there were such things as bound codices,” Liberman Mintz told JNS. “This is the first material evidence of the Hebrew book.”

Several manuscripts from the JTS collection are part of the exhibition at the Museum of the Bible to contextualize the Afghan Liturgical Quire, and the exhibition will travel to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York after its run in Washington. The Dutch publisher Brill plans to publish a scholarly tome on the research underpinning the show in April.

Gary Rendsburg, distinguished professor of Jewish studies and chair in Jewish history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, told JNS that Jews kept using scrolls, much like they do in synagogues today, for centuries but they resisted the book, which was associated with Christianity until Muslims adopted the technology.

“At some point, they had to turn to the codex, which is the forerunner of the modern book, and their Christian and Muslim neighbors had the codex, but the Jews resisted,” he said. “We didn’t know when they created the codex. At what point did they say, ‘This is really a wonderful idea?’”

Unlike with a scroll, one can flip pages quickly in a codex, and a book takes half the parchment since one can write on both sides.

“Jews resisted because of the Christians,” Rendsburg told JNS. “Once the Muslims started the codex at the very beginning, that served as the impetus for the Jews to say this is OK.”

The Afghan Liturgical Quire, he said, “really pushes the history of the Jewish book qua book back approximately 200 years. That’s the most significant aspect.”

Rendsburg compared a pocket-sized book like the quire to a small paperback one would take to the beach today.

“This almost undoubtedly would have been from some traveler, who needed the prayers that he quasi-knew by memory but still needed a guide for,” he said.

Rendsburg noted that one of the prayers in the book, which is for Shabbat, comes from Psalm 92. “It only quotes the first two or three verses, and then it says, ‘and the rest until the end,’” he said. “So it got you started.” 

Variations in spelling in the manuscript are to be expected, according to Rendsburg. “Every manuscript is sui generis. You don’t get a fixed text until the age of printing, so you have this siddur with this wording and another siddur even in the same community with a different wording,” he said.

Problematic provenance

When Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, presented the book in 2013 at a Religion Newswriters Association conference, the founder of the museum and its board chair said that the manuscript dated to the ninth century.

In November 2017, when the museum opened in Washington, it exhibited the closed book alongside an open facsimile of the object. It stated that the book is a “small ‘siddur,’ a Jewish prayer book written about AD 840.” A label added that the object, which came from the “Middle East,” is “the oldest known siddur or Jewish prayer book known to survive. The manuscript’s complex structure presents many mysteries for scholars.”

“The siddur was thought to be part of private collections in England since the 1950s. However, Museum of the Bible curators recently discovered a photograph that shows that it was in Afghanistan in 1997,” the label stated. “This raises clear concern about the manuscript’s ownership history.”

Hepler told JNS that Hobby Lobby acquired the quire in July 2013—half a year after he started at the museum—and the manuscript went on view for a short time in Israel in 2014. In 2015, Green donated the book to the museum.

The quire was on view from when the museum opened in November 2017, until the museum’s research team met in May 2018 to discuss it.

In 2016, Hepler was “was practicing paleography things which I learned from Malachi’s codicology course a few months earlier.” He was researching every manuscript in the museum’s collection without a colophon—an autograph statement in which the author or authors of a manuscript self-identify.

“I recognized it immediately,” he said of the image he found. He felt “a lot of things,” he told JNS. “Definitely shock and angst.” The title of the article in Tablet that contained the image, he said, was “War Papers.”

It turned out that the manuscript, which had been believed to be in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, was an object that a Hazara man found in a cave below a collapsed ceiling in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 1997. (Hazaras are a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.)

The man gave the object to the local Afghan leader, Karim Khalili, who recognized it as sacred and covered it with a cloth and placed it in a special box. It is not clear under what circumstances the book was then put up for sale, and who with connections to the ruler—or the ruler himself—actually sold it.

“One of Rahbar Khalili’s deputies apparently attempted to sell the ALQ between 1998 and 2001,” the Museum of the Bible website states, adding that it was “bought (apparently) by an unnamed private collector in London in summer 2001, who held it in London for a decade or more.” Hobby Lobby bought it from “an Israeli dealer” in July 2013.

“Curators confirmed multiple attempted sales of the ALQ in the United States and Europe between March 1998 and July 2001 before one of Khalili’s deputies apparently sold the ALQ to a private collector in London around Aug./Sept. 2001,” it adds. “Despite several leads, the name of this private collector has yet to be confirmed.”

The manuscript “remains accessible in Washington, D.C., because of the kindness of Afghanistan officials (from the pre-Taliban government), who followed a human rights-based approach to cultural heritage with the Museum of the Bible to ensure displaced Afghan Jews can continue to safely access and enjoy the oldest Hebrew book in the world,” per a brochure about the quire that the museum published.

“Especially in today’s world, where you are dealing with what restorative justice looks like—I think it’s a little too narrow right now,” Hepler told JNS. “The main problem is some of the field has not integrated human rights-based thinking into their cultural heritage thought. So there’s a little too much nationalism going on with cultural heritage thought. The only system of restorative justice is this one lever mechanism of ‘We got to return it to the source country.’”

Hepler added that the Museum of the Bible “has a heightened concern for religious communities and their rights associated with their sacred texts.”

He told JNS that the Taliban has not requested the book back, and Afghan Jews, largely in New York, have supported the museum in its decision to retain and exhibit the book and in “creating this partnership that prioritizes access for the religious community connected to this sacred book.”

Speaking at the Sunday reception, Carlos Campo, CEO of the Museum of the Bible, said that a “simple, small artifact” was bringing people together in peace.

Adela Raz, the last Afghan ambassador to the United States, told the audience that the show represents “a celebration of diversity, coexistence and rich history and beauty that defines Afghan history and its heritage.”

The object and the show send a “powerful message” of “resilience, unity and the enduring spirit of Afghanistan,” Raz said. “Today’s exhibition serves as a powerful reminder of what Afghanistan once was—an integral part of the Silk Road, a crossroad of trade routes and a beacon of great civilization.”

“Afghanistan once was a place where people from across the corners of the world not only passed through but chose to stay, contributing to the vibrant and diverse culture that made our country so unique,” she said. “For centuries, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims lived side-by-side in harmony, enriching our collective cultural heritage.”

Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardi Federation, told attendees that “Jewish history is so much about travels, but particularly for the Sephardic world.

“Sephardim were the ones who were breaking the borders and the barriers. They were the philosophers, the poets, the scholars, the scientists, the singers,” he said. “They were the ones who really invigorated the Silk Road and helped give us the cosmopolitan world.” 

Rendsburg told JNS that the first material evidence of the Hebrew book could give way to other such discoveries. “The hope would be, yes, we would always find more,” he said.