On 25 August 1883, The Athenæum published the third and final installment of Dr. Ginsburg’s transcription and translation of the manuscript strips. The article began, “This concludes the original and the translation of the MS. as far as it was necessary for the continuity of the narrative. The rest of the slips either contain duplicate matter or are undecipherable. It will be seen that we have here nearly the whole of Deuteronomy in an abridged form.”[1]

A Hebrew transcription and a translation of the yet-unpublished strips followed this introduction. 

Download “The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no 2913, 25 August 1883.

The article ended with a notice from Dr. Ginsburg that said, “I have designedly abstained from making any remark or calling attention to any anomalies in the Hebrew text, as my report, which is to appear next week, will contain a full account of all the peculiarities of the MS. and the conclusion I have arrived at about its genuineness. Christian D. Ginsburg.”[2]

Ginsburg’s conclusion was already in the hands of Bond and would appear in the 27 August 1883 edition of The Times. Based upon his 23 August 1883 note to Ginsburg, Shapira was on his way to Germany. Perhaps he was going to visit his eldest daughter who was there enrolled in school, but this was not his ultimate destination. His eyes were set on the Netherlands and on another opportunity to present his rejected leather strips to the learned world.

In all, Dr. Ginsburg published three installments of the Shapira MSS in The Athenæum. Scans of all three are here available for your download and study.


“The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no. 2911, 11 August 1883, 178-9

“The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no. 2912, 18 August 1883, 206

“The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no. 2913, 25 August 1883, 242-4


See my Nineteenth Century Transcriptions of Shapira’s MSS for a comprehensive treatment. It contains my Hebrew transcriptions of eight fragments of Moses W. Shapira’s leather strips (designated A-H). It includes scans of the 19th-century transcriptions of Moses W. Shapira, Hermann Guthe, Eduard Meyer, and Christian D. Ginsburg.


[1] “The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no. 2913, 25 August 1883, 242.

[2] “The Shapira MS. of Deuteronomy,” The Athenæum, no. 2913, 25 August 1883, 244.