Although recent scholarship on the biblical studies survey course has sought to bring in a wide array of new methods and ways to incorporate the Bible into the broader liberal arts curriculum, a dearth of tactics for employing biblical manuscripts in the classroom remains. This article details one experience crafting two class sessions for an introductory Hebrew Bible course, employing manuscripts and rare books to spark students' insights into the questions of textual transmission, scribal practices, the materiality of sacred texts, and the significance of manuscripts as windows into the people and cultures which create, use, and own them. This lesson plan successfully facilitated firsthand learning about the importance of embodied texts as witnesses to the complex, messy transmission of the Hebrew Bible and its role in diverse cultures and times.