London Manuscript of the Book of Exodus Facsimile Edition

Seven columns of Hebrew run across a single sheet of leather, carrying Exodus 9:18–13:2, from the seventh plague to the ordinance on the consecration of the firstborn. Known in recent scholarship as the London Manuscript and long kept in the library of Jews’ College, London (now the London School of Jewish Studies), where it bears the shelf mark MS 31, the sheet survives from a Torah scroll assigned on paleographic grounds to Egypt in the seventh or eighth century.

A Torah Scroll Reassembled Across Three Collections

First published in 1959 by Solomon Asher Birnbaum, who judged its writing exceptionally old, the sheet long stood alone. In 2015 Edna Engel and Mordechay Mishor argued that a leather fragment at Duke University, carrying Exodus 13:19–16:1 with the Song of the Sea, had once followed it in the same scroll; radiocarbon analysis of that fragment supports a seventh- or eighth-century date. Further fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection in Cambridge, recovered from the Cairo Genizah, have since been attributed to the same roll.

Gvil, Ruled Columns, and a Proto-Square Hand

The support is gvil, a thick tanned hide inscribed on the hair side alone, the sheet measuring roughly 51.3 by 76 cm. Nothing decorates it. The surface offers ruled columns and a semi-formal hand of proto-square type, an early stage of the square script that later became standard for Hebrew Bibles. One lacuna interrupts the final column.

A Text Written for the Synagogue Reading

Scrolls such as this were made for liturgical reading rather than private study, and their wording belongs to the proto-Masoretic tradition from which the received consonantal text descends.

Very few Torah scrolls survive from so early a date, and this one survives by accident: a working object, retired rather than treasured, whose scattered sheets are now read by scholars instead of congregations.