If you want to know exactly what the Hebrew text of the Old Testament says, where do you look? Not at the Dead Sea Scrolls, valuable as they are: they are mostly fragments, and they differ among themselves. Scholars and translators turn instead to two medieval books, both written by the most careful scribes of the Masoretic tradition, and both with remarkable stories. They are the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex.

A codex is simply a book with pages, as opposed to a scroll. Torah scrolls for synagogue reading had to be scrolls, without vowels or notes. But for study and for preserving the full Masoretic tradition, scribes from about the ninth century onwards produced great codices of the whole Bible, with vowels, accents and the Masorah in the margins.

The Aleppo Codex: the crown

The Aleppo Codex was written in Tiberias around 930 CE. Its consonants were copied by a scribe named Shlomo ben Buya’a, and its vowels, accents and Masoretic notes were added by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the most famous Masorete of all. It was a model codex, intended to be the authoritative copy against which others could be checked.

It was soon recognised as such. In the twelfth century, the great scholar Maimonides saw it in Egypt and used it to settle questions about the layout of the Torah. In his law code he describes the book he relied on as the one “known in Egypt, which contains the twenty-four books, and which was in Jerusalem,” corrected by Ben Asher, and says that “everyone relied on it” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 8:4). Most scholars identify that book with the Aleppo Codex.

Around the end of the fourteenth century the codex was taken to Aleppo, in Syria, where it was kept for nearly six hundred years in the city’s great synagogue. The community called it the Keter, “the Crown.” It was guarded so closely that few outside scholars were ever allowed to see it, let alone photograph it.

1947 and after

In December 1947, after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, riots broke out in Aleppo. The synagogue was set on fire. For a time it was feared the codex had been destroyed. In fact much of it had survived, but when it reached Israel in 1958, smuggled out of Syria, a large part was missing. About 295 of its original leaves survive, roughly 60 percent. Almost all of the Torah is lost: the surviving text begins in Deuteronomy 28. Some of the missing leaves may have been burned; others were very likely taken during or after the riots. A few single leaves have since come to light. The full story, including disputes over how the codex reached Israel, is told by Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider in Crown of Aleppo and, more critically, by the journalist Matti Friedman in The Aleppo Codex.

The Aleppo Codex is now kept in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and high-resolution photographs are freely available online. It is the basis of the Hebrew University Bible Project, a major critical edition, and of several Israeli editions of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Jerusalem Crown edition. For the parts that are lost, editors rely on other manuscripts in the same tradition, above all the Leningrad Codex.

The Leningrad Codex: complete and dated

The Leningrad Codex was completed in 1008 CE (its colophon also gives the date in other systems, which point to 1008 or 1009). It was written in Cairo by a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob, who copied the consonants and added the vowels, accents and Masorah himself. His colophon says that he corrected the codex according to books prepared by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher.

It is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that survives. It contains all twenty-four books of the Hebrew canon (the thirty-nine of the Protestant Old Testament), in 491 leaves of parchment. It also contains sixteen “carpet pages,” decorated pages of geometric designs made partly of tiny Masoretic notes written in patterns.

In the nineteenth century the codex was acquired by the Karaite collector Abraham Firkovich, and in 1863 it came, with his collection, to the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, now the National Library of Russia, where it remains. Its shelf mark is Firkovich B 19 A. The city was called Leningrad during the Soviet era, and the name stuck.

Why it became the standard

In the early twentieth century the German scholar Rudolf Kittel and his collaborator Paul Kahle were preparing a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, Biblia Hebraica. The first two editions, in 1906 and 1913, were based on the Rabbinic Bible printed in Venice in 1524–25, a printed text put together from late manuscripts. Kahle argued that it would be far better to base the edition on a manuscript of the genuine Ben Asher tradition. The Aleppo Codex was out of reach in Syria; the Leningrad Codex was available. The third edition of Biblia Hebraica (1937) was the first printed Hebrew Bible to reproduce it.

Since then, the Leningrad Codex has been the basis of:

  • Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS, 1967–1977), for decades the standard Hebrew Bible for students and translators;
  • Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), its successor, being published book by book since 2004;
  • the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), a freely available digital transcription first produced at Westminster Theological Seminary and maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center, which in turn underlies open projects such as the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible and MACULA Hebrew.

In 1998 a full photographic facsimile was published, edited by David Noel Freedman and others, so that anyone could check the printed editions against the manuscript itself.

How close are the two?

Very close. Scholars who have compared the Leningrad Codex with the Aleppo Codex in the books where both survive find that they agree almost entirely in their consonants and very largely in their vowels and accents. Where they differ, the Aleppo Codex is generally regarded as the more precise representative of the Ben Asher tradition; the Leningrad Codex has more corrections and occasional inconsistencies, some of which may come from Samuel ben Jacob conforming an earlier text to Ben Asher’s model (Würthwein and Fischer 2014). Mordechai Breuer, who prepared an edition based on the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, found that the differences are mostly in small details of vowels and accents.

For a reader of a translation, these differences almost never change the meaning. What the comparison shows is that two manuscripts, written about eighty years apart and in different cities, preserve the same text with extraordinary precision, and that both agree closely with the “proto-Masoretic” scrolls from the Judean desert written nearly a thousand years earlier.

Why Open Word Bible uses the Leningrad Codex

Open Word Bible translates the Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, with word-by-word data from MACULA Hebrew and the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible. There are three reasons.

  • It is complete. Every book and every verse is there, from one manuscript, so there is no need to stitch sources together.
  • It is the scholarly standard. It is the text behind BHS and BHQ, which almost every modern translation consults, so our decisions can be compared directly with theirs.
  • It is open. The WLC is in the public domain, so our Hebrew data can be shared as freely as our translation.

Each sentence’s reasoning record shows the Hebrew exactly as the WLC data gives it. Where scholars think the Masoretic text has a problem, and another ancient witness should be preferred, the decision is recorded and explained, as described in our method articles.

Sources

  • Freedman, David Noel, Astrid B. Beck, and James A. Sanders, eds. The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998.
  • Friedman, Matti. The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2012.
  • Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Aleppo Codex and the Rise of the Massoretic Bible Text.” Biblical Archaeologist 42 (1979): 145–163.
  • Maimonides. Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 8:4.
  • Tawil, Hayim, and Bernard Schneider. Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010.
  • Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.
  • Würthwein, Ernst, and Alexander Achilles Fischer. The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
  • The Aleppo Codex online: aleppocodex.org.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.