Currently part of Hobby Lobby President Steven Green’s “Green Collection,” the largest private collection of biblical texts and artifacts in the world, the siddur and the rest of the collection will be donated to the as yet unnamed international Bible museum in Washington, D.C., slated to open in 2017.An interview follows. And here's some more information on the siddur:
Jerry Pattengale—assistant provost at Indiana Wesleyan University and director of the Green Scholars Initiative, the research arm of the Green Collection—spoke to JNS.org about the discovery of the ancient siddur, Jewish-Christian relations, and the upcoming Bible museum.
“When we realized what we were looking at, we decided it would be best to carbon date it. We removed two small sections from the book non-invasively and sent them to two separate labs. They did not know what they were testing; it was a double blind test. Both results came back with a date of 840 CE. Our scholars had originally dated it to 850 CE. The whole process was very exciting.”This sounds promising. As always, I would like to see the results of the paleographic analysis, tests, etc., published in a peer-review journal. The rest of the article has more information on the Green Collection and the siddur itself.
What contents of the siddur would modern Jews find familiar, and what would they find different?
“It has services for the Sabbath and the 100 blessings, which you would find in most modern prayer books. That alone makes it relevant to most Jewish communities and something they would recognize right away. There is also the liturgy in there for Passover and the ‘Song of Songs’ poem for Sukkot.”
“I think something a lot of people would be interested in is the poem on the end of times or the apocalyptic text. This is a story that was very popular at the time, but we don’t see often anymore. Finally, there is a really unique section at the end that we are calling the ‘Salvation for Zion.’”
Background here and links.
