EDITIONS • ALEPPO CODEX • JERUSALEM 2000

The Jerusalem Crown and the Aleppo Text

The Jerusalem Crown, published in 2000 as the Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a printed Hebrew Bible that follows the text and the Masorah of the Aleppo Codex and of related manuscripts, according to the method of Mordechai Breuer. Yosef Ofer had scientific responsibility for the edition. This note describes the book from the bibliographic record. The journal essay follows Breuer’s path to that text in more detail.

Part of the subject hub The Aleppo Codex

Title
Jerusalem Crown, the Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Published
Jerusalem, 2000
Method
Mordechai Breuer’s, applied to the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts
Scientific responsibility
Yosef Ofer
Ink-and-watercolour illustration in the same style as the reference picture: bright natural daylight, clear consistent linear perspective, warm stone and wood, cream parchment, blue sky. All objects at realistic relative scale: a closed book has the thickness and length of a real bound volume on a table, an inkwell is small enough to sit in the palm, a reed pen or pointer is about as long as a hand, a table is ordinary table height, a stool is stool height, an arch or doorway is the height of a room. Nothing is gigantic or miniature relative to anything else. No people, no faces, no hands, no crosses or Christian symbols, no window glass and no glazing bars, no legible writing and no pseudo-script, no letters, numbers or marks that look like an alphabet. A wooden table with a large modern printed Bible lying open, cream pages without letters, and a smaller older closed volume of ordinary book size beside it. An unglazed rectangular opening looks onto pale hills and a single pine of realistic tree height.
Illustration: a large open printed Bible beside a smaller older volume, for the Jerusalem Crown, a complete printed text established from the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts.
The edition at a glance
The Jerusalem Crown and the Aleppo Text
Scope: Torah, Prophets and Writings
Extent: 874 pages, according to the Bar-Ilan University record
What it includes: explanations of the principles of the version
A related page: Yosef Ofer and the methods of the Masora

The edition is a printed Bible, not a facsimile of the damaged Aleppo Codex.

Breuer’s Path to the Aleppo Text

The Aleppo Codex, the Tiberian model book associated with Aaron ben Asher, does not survive complete. Any printed Bible that claims to follow it must decide how to treat the missing parts, and how to relate the surviving pages to other manuscripts. Mordechai Breuer developed a method for that work, recovering a text on the basis of the Aleppo Codex where it is extant and of related manuscripts where it is not. The journal essay traces that method and the earlier editions in which it was tried.

The Jerusalem Crown is the full Bible produced on those principles, with explanations of the version. It is not a diplomatic reprint of a single surviving manuscript, and it is not an eclectic edition in the sense of the HBCE. It is a Ben Asher text, established by a stated method, for reading and for study.

Ink-and-watercolour illustration in the same style as the reference picture: bright natural daylight, clear consistent linear perspective, warm stone and wood, cream parchment, blue sky. All objects at realistic relative scale: a closed book has the thickness and length of a real bound volume on a table, an inkwell is small enough to sit in the palm, a reed pen or pointer is about as long as a hand, a table is ordinary table height, a stool is stool height, an arch or doorway is the height of a room. Nothing is gigantic or miniature relative to anything else. No people, no faces, no hands, no crosses or Christian symbols, no window glass and no glazing bars, no legible writing and no pseudo-script, no letters, numbers or marks that look like an alphabet. Close view of a large open printed Bible with empty cream pages and a smaller older closed volume of ordinary book size beside it. Wooden table only. No window, no hills, no pine, no people.
Illustration: a close view of the printed Bible and the older volume, without the landscape.

The Edition of 2000

The Bar-Ilan University research record describes the book as Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published at Jerusalem in 2000, 874 pages, covering the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings according to the text and the Masorah of the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, according to the method of Rav Mordechai Breuer, with explanations of the version principles, and with scientific responsibility for the edition assigned to Yosef Ofer.[1]

Ofer’s role links the volume to the modern study of the Masorah described on the page on Yosef Ofer. The book is a university Bible, intended to be used, not a reconstructed object for the glass case.

Beside Other Modern Bibles

In the family of modern scholarly Bibles the Jerusalem Crown stands closer to the Hebrew University Bible, which also takes Aleppo as its base, than to BHQ, which is a diplomatic edition of Leningrad, or to the HBCE, which prints an eclectic text. The differences are of aim as much as of manuscript.

A reader who wants the Codex itself goes to the surviving pages of Aleppo and to the photographs of them. A reader who wants a complete printed Bible established on Breuer’s method goes to the Jerusalem Crown. The two are related, and they are not the same book.

The journal essay on the Jerusalem Crown The Aleppo Codex Yosef Ofer

Selected Bibliography

[1] Bar-Ilan University record for the Jerusalem Crown
Bar-Ilan University research portal, record for Y. Ofer, Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 2000), 874 pages, “Torah, Prophets and Hagiographa according to the text and the Masora of the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, according to the method of Rav Mordechai Breuer with explanations of the version principles, scientific responsibility on that edition: Yosef Ofer.” *
The Jerusalem Crown Edition of the Hebrew Bible (journal) · The Aleppo Codex · Yosef Ofer and the Methods of the Masora · The Hebrew University Bible as an Edition · Aaron ben Asher
Companion notes on this site.

This note follows the Bar-Ilan University bibliographic record for the edition of 2000. The history of Breuer’s method is left to the journal essay, which is not repeated here.