Essays on the Masoretes and the Hebrew and Greek Bibles
British Library Or. 4445 preserves nearly two thirds of the Torah as a scribe named Nissi ben Daniel wrote, pointed and annotated it in the age of the Ben Ashers, with a margin that seems to speak of Ben Asher as a living man. Restored on paper in 1540 and bought by the British Museum in 1891, it is still debated for its date and its Persian connections.
On a December night in 1158, in England, Abraham ibn Ezra dreamed that the Sabbath sent him a letter of complaint. The wandering Spanish grammarian carried the Hebrew learning of al-Andalus to Christian Europe, praised the codices checked at Tiberias above all others, and left hints about Scripture that Spinoza later made famous.
In his seventies David Kimhi set out from Narbonne to defend Maimonides and fell ill at Avila. Earlier journeys had taken him to the model codices of Toledo and Saragossa. His grammar, his manual for scribes and his theory of the qere and ketiv shaped how the pointed Bible was read for centuries.
The Talmud says the first sages were called soferim because they counted every letter of the Torah, and remembers a Babylonian teacher who refused to check their count. From Ezra at the Water Gate to three scrolls compared in the Temple court, the scribes left the habits the Masoretes inherited.
In 1239 Elijah ben Berechiah, son of the author of the Fox Fables, shaped the Masorah of a northern French Bible into letters and pictures and signed himself scribe, pointer and masran. Long dismissed as ornament, his notes turn out to follow the eastern Tiberian codices closely.
Early in 1082, probably in Cairo, a Rabbanite leader promised his Karaite bride she need not sit by a Sabbath candle. The two communities split over the calendar, the table and the oral law, yet read, copied and pointed the same Bible, down to a codex dedicated to a Karaite synagogue and trusted by Maimonides.
Jacob ben Hayyim fixed the rabbinic Bible in Venice without the Aleppo Codex, and every later printing inherited his manuscripts. At Bar-Ilan, Menachem Cohen and his team spent decades rebuilding Miqraot Gedolot on the Crown, its Masorah and commentaries restored from their own manuscripts.
Maimonides found the songs written in confusion and trusted a book corrected by ben Asher. The Talmud’s brickwork, the line-lists in Soferim, the disagreements of the great codices, and the Ashkar-Gilson scroll show a scribal tradition that lived beside the Masorah, not inside it.
In twelfth-century Cairo a traveler found two synagogues reading the Law at different speeds. The shorter Palestinian lessons, the sedarim, survived in the Masorah, in disagreed counts, and in the margins of the manuscripts Ginsburg later collated in London.
A German pastor in Cairo, later a professor in Bonn and an exile in Oxford, taught modern scholarship to treat the vowels of the Hebrew Bible as a history with more than one centre, and he put the Leningrad Codex under the eyes of a printed critical edition.
Later work on the vowels, accents and Masoretic notes of the early Hebrew Bible manuscripts still begins from the books Israel Yeivin wrote in Jerusalem. Those handbooks can be watched at work in the scholarship that cites them, page by page.
The scribe of the Leningrad Codex left his name in the book itself, and his work can now be followed in other manuscripts as well. Those copies show habits that are unusual among Tiberian Bible codices, including a Masorah magna that was, on at least one occasion, reproduced identically.
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia was planned as a new setting of one manuscript, not as a reconstruction of an original Hebrew Bible. Its Masorah, edited by Gérard Weil, is the part of the page that most needs a separate explanation.
The Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ does not survive as a single book. Its author wrote a long version and then a short one, later readers made Hebrew and Arabic abridgements, and the names under which the work travelled are almost as various as the copies.
The short Tiberian treatise known as Diqduqe ha-Teʿamim does not survive in a single fixed form. Its copies differ in length and arrangement, and the printed editions have made those differences more visible rather than less.
Paula bat Avraham of Rome and Miriam bat Benayah of Sanaa are the best-attested women who copied Hebrew manuscripts in the Middle Ages, known almost entirely from the colophons in which they named themselves.
From eighth-century inscriptions in Afghanistan to the Pentateuch copied by Joseph ben Moses in 1319 and the verse epics of Šāhin, Persian written in Hebrew letters carried a thousand-year tradition of Bible translation among the Jews of Iran and Central Asia.
Catalogued for a century as a clumsy seventeenth-century copy, Rotolo 2 of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna was recognised in 2013 as the oldest complete Torah scroll known and as the “Bible of Ezra” once treasured by the Dominicans of San Domenico.
Seligmann Baer of Biebrich spent his life on the Masorah and the liturgy, producing with Franz Delitzsch the Leipzig editions of the Hebrew Bible, the standard Seder Avodat Yisrael and the Masorah of the Vilna rabbinic Bible, and his methods were sharply criticised by Ginsburg.
Malachi Beit-Arié’s study of the dated Hebrew manuscripts copied before 1540 shows how parchment, paper, quiring, ruling and the colophons of individual scribes reveal where and how medieval Hebrew books were made.
The Hilleli, the Muggah, the Zambuki and the Jerusalem codex were cited for centuries as authorities in the margins of Hebrew Bibles, yet none of them survives, and what is known of them comes from the readings later scribes and scholars recorded.
Printed in Amsterdam in 1661 and 1667 with the help of the Utrecht Hebraist Johannes Leusden, the Bibles of Joseph Athias introduced a new system of verse numbers, earned their printer a gold medal from the States General, and through the edition of Van der Hooght became the received text of the Hebrew Bible for scholars until the nineteenth century.
Published under the aegis of the Hebrew University at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Jerusalem Crown set the text of the Aleppo Codex, as established by Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, in three columns to the page in a new typeface, and documented the evidence for every decision in its accompanying volumes.
Written in Arabic by a Karaite scholar in Jerusalem around the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Book of Differences is the only reliable record of how the Masoretes Ben Asher and Ben Naftali disagreed, and the standard by which the great Tiberian codices are still classified.
