Sources

Hebrew and Aramaic

The continuous medieval copy for Hebrew and Aramaic books is the Leningrad Codex, through an open diplomatic text: the Westminster Leningrad Codex as published by the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible. That transcription is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The manuscript text itself is ancient and in the public domain. Genesis and Ruth follow this copy.

Dead Sea Scrolls and other earlier witnesses replace Leningrad when they preserve an earlier reading. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a witness, not the default. For Tobit, the earlier witnesses are the Qumran copies: Aramaic 4Q196, 4Q197, 4Q198, and 4Q199, and Hebrew 4Q200. They are fragments. A readable line is preferred over the later Greek. A broken line is described as broken. Editorial restorations in brackets are not treated as words on the leather.

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia is not reprinted.

Greek

The open Greek Old Testament named for this project is Henry Barclay Swete’s edition, which is in the public domain. The open Greek New Testament named for this project is the SBL Greek New Testament. Rahlfs is not reprinted. Nestle-Aland is not reprinted. NETS is not reprinted.

Swete’s Tobit is the shorter text of Vaticanus. The English of Tobit does not follow that shorter text. It follows Qumran where a Semitic line can be read, and otherwise the longer Greek of Codex Sinaiticus. Sinaiticus is a fourth-century manuscript. Its text is ancient. The transcription consulted to read it was made by the Codex Sinaiticus Project and is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. That transcription is not reprinted here. The English is a new translation, not a derivative edition of their XML.

Where Sinaiticus itself has a gap, the gap stays a gap unless a Qumran fragment preserves readable words. Those words are printed as a fragment, not renumbered to match a later edition.

What the English is

The English is this project’s own text. It is free to copy, share, and adapt under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Attribution: Kingdoms of Scripture. The model and draft date of each published book are on the Models page and in a process note on the book.

Existing English Bibles were not a wording source. Septuagint, Syriac, and Latin, when used, witness the source wording. They are not models for the English sentences.