Codex Reuchlinianus and the Expanded Tiberian Vocalisation

In the Badische Landesbibliothek at Karlsruhe there is a Hebrew manuscript of the Prophets that has been known since the nineteenth century as the Codex Reuchlinianus, after the German humanist Johann Reuchlin, who owned it at the beginning of the sixteenth century. According to its colophon it was completed in the year 1105 or 1106 of the common era. It is a large and carefully written book, and it contains the Hebrew text of the Former and Latter Prophets together with the Aramaic Targum. What has given it a particular place in the study of the Hebrew Bible, however, is not its text but its pointing. The vowel signs and accents of the manuscript are the familiar signs of the Tiberian system, the system used in nearly every printed Hebrew Bible, but they are applied according to rules that differ in many respects from those of the standard Tiberian manuscripts such as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. Scholars have called this form of pointing the expanded, extended or Palestino-Tiberian vocalisation, and the Codex Reuchlinianus is its most extensive and best known witness. This article describes the setting of the manuscript in the history of Hebrew vocalisation, its physical character and contents, its history in the hands of Reuchlin and his heirs, the features of its pointing, and the different ways in which scholars have interpreted those features.¹²³

The Background in the History of Hebrew Vocalisation

Three Systems of Signs

For many centuries the Hebrew Bible was written with consonants alone. The reading of the text, including its vowels, its stress and its division into phrases, was transmitted orally, and the written scroll served as a guide to a recitation that the reader had already learned. Between roughly the seventh and the ninth centuries of the common era, scholars in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia devised systems of written signs to record this oral tradition in the text itself. Three principal systems are known. The Palestinian system, the oldest of the three, used dots placed mostly above the letters and is preserved chiefly in fragments from the Cairo Genizah. The Babylonian system, developed in the academies of Iraq, also placed its signs above the letters, but used a different set of symbols, some of them derived from small forms of Hebrew letters. The Tiberian system, developed by the Masoretes of Tiberias in Galilee, placed most of its vowel signs below the letters and was accompanied by a highly refined system of accents. These three systems are treated in their own articles on this site, and they are described here only so far as is needed to explain the place of the Codex Reuchlinianus among them.⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸

The Tiberian system was not merely a set of signs. It was the written form of a particular reading tradition, the pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible as it was recited by the Masoretes of Tiberias, and it distinguished more vowel qualities than either of the other systems. It had separate signs for the vowels now called qamets, patah, tsere, segol, hireq, holem, qibbuts and shureq, and it used the sign called shewa, together with the composite hataf signs, to represent very short or absent vowels. It marked doubled consonants and the hard pronunciation of certain letters with a dot called dagesh, and it marked the soft or spirantised pronunciation, in some manuscripts, with a stroke above the letter called rafe. To these it added the accents, which indicated both the stressed syllable of each word and the syntactic division of the verse, and which also served as signs for the musical chanting of the text.^910111213

Ben Asher and the Standard Tradition

Within Tiberias itself there were several families and schools of Masoretes, of whom the best known are the families of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali. The differences between these two schools concerned a limited number of details, chiefly the placing of certain accents and of the secondary stress mark called gaʿya, and they are recorded in medieval lists of the differences between the two masters. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries the tradition of Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last and most famous member of his family, had come to be regarded as authoritative, largely because Maimonides is reported to have used a manuscript corrected by him, now identified with the Aleppo Codex, as his model for the writing of Torah scrolls. The work of the Tiberian schools, and the lists of differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, are described in a separate article on this site.^14151617

Mixed and Transitional Forms

The three principal systems were not sealed off from one another. Fragments from the Cairo Genizah show that scribes trained in one system sometimes adopted signs from another, and that the Palestinian and Babylonian systems both existed in more and less developed forms. As the Tiberian system gained prestige in the tenth and eleventh centuries, its signs were adopted by communities whose own pronunciation of Hebrew did not correspond exactly to the Tiberian reading. In some cases the signs were used in the standard way and the local pronunciation was simply imposed on them in reading. In other cases, however, scribes adapted the use of the signs to their own pronunciation, so that the pointing of their manuscripts reflects a reading tradition different from that of the Masoretes of Tiberias. The expanded Tiberian vocalisation of the Codex Reuchlinianus belongs to this second group, and for that reason it has been studied not only as a curiosity of scribal practice but as evidence for the pronunciation of Hebrew in the communities that used it.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰

The Manuscript

Contents and Date

The Codex Reuchlinianus is a parchment codex of the Prophets. It contains the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which Jewish tradition calls the Former Prophets, and the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets, which are called the Latter Prophets. The Hebrew text is accompanied by the Aramaic translation known as Targum Jonathan, the official Targum of the Prophets in the Babylonian rabbinic tradition, and the manuscript is therefore a witness both to the Hebrew text and to the Aramaic version. The relationship between the Hebrew and the Aramaic in medieval manuscripts of this kind varied: in some codices the Targum follows each verse of the Hebrew, in others it is written in a separate column or in the margins. In the Codex Reuchlinianus the Targum has its own vocalisation, and this too has attracted the interest of scholars of Aramaic.²¹²²²³

The colophon of the manuscript records the date of its completion in the Jewish era of the creation, corresponding to the year 1105 or 1106 of the common era. This makes the Codex Reuchlinianus about a century younger than the Leningrad Codex and some hundred and seventy years younger than the Aleppo Codex. It is not, therefore, one of the early Masoretic codices, and its text does not have the authority of the manuscripts written by or in the immediate circle of the Tiberian Masoretes. Its importance lies rather in the fact that it was written at a time when the Tiberian signs had spread far beyond Tiberias and were being adapted to new uses, and that it preserves, in an exceptionally full and consistent form, one of those adaptations.²⁴²⁵²⁶

Place of Writing

Where the manuscript was written is less certain than when. Its script and the arrangement of its pages are those of a European Hebrew book rather than of an Eastern one, and most scholars have placed its origin either in Italy or in the Rhineland and northern France, the region that medieval Jews called Ashkenaz. The question is connected with the interpretation of its pointing. Ilan Eldar, in his study of the Hebrew language tradition of medieval Ashkenaz, showed that many of the features of the expanded Tiberian vocalisation are also found in Ashkenazi manuscripts of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, and that they correspond to what can be reconstructed of the pronunciation of Hebrew in the Jewish communities of northern Europe at that time. Other scholars have emphasised the connections between the expanded system and the Palestinian tradition, and have pointed out that the Jews of Italy and Ashkenaz received much of their learning from the Land of Israel. The two views are not wholly exclusive, since the early Ashkenazi communities are themselves thought to have inherited a pronunciation of Hebrew close to the Palestinian.²⁷²⁸²⁹

Layout and Script

The codex is written in a square Hebrew script of the kind used for biblical manuscripts in medieval Europe, with the text arranged in columns and the Masoretic notes written in the margins and between the columns. The pages carry the Masorah parva, the brief notes in the side margins that record the number of occurrences of a word or a spelling, and the Masorah magna, the longer notes written above and below the text. These notes, like the pointing, show some departures from the standard Tiberian tradition, and Sperber drew attention to them in the introduction to his facsimile. The manuscript is not decorated in the manner of the great Sephardi Bibles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it lacks the carpet pages and micrographic designs that are found in those books. It is a working codex of the Prophets, written with care but without display, of the kind that would have been used for study and for the reading of the prophetic lessons in the synagogue.³⁰³¹

Johann Reuchlin and the Journey to Karlsruhe

The Christian Hebraist

Johann Reuchlin was born at Pforzheim in 1455 and died in 1522. He was a lawyer by training and served the dukes of Württemberg and later the Swabian League, but his lasting fame rests on his work as a scholar of Greek and Hebrew. He learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, among them the physician Jacob ben Jehiel Loans at the court of the emperor Frederick III and the Italian scholar Obadiah Sforno at Rome, and in 1506 he published the De rudimentis hebraicis, a grammar and dictionary that was the first comprehensive introduction to the Hebrew language written by a Christian for Christian readers. He was also deeply interested in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, which he discussed in two treatises, De verbo mirifico and De arte cabalistica.³²³³

Reuchlin’s reputation was made, in the eyes of many contemporaries, by his opposition to the campaign of Johannes Pfefferkorn, a convert from Judaism, to have Jewish books confiscated and destroyed. When the emperor Maximilian I asked for expert opinions on the question in 1510, Reuchlin argued that Jewish books, with the exception of a few that were openly blasphemous, should not be destroyed, and that they were of value to Christian scholarship. The controversy that followed lasted for most of a decade, drew in the theologians of Cologne and the humanists of Germany and Italy, and became one of the great intellectual disputes of the years before the Reformation. David Price has described the episode in detail and has shown how Reuchlin’s defence of Jewish books was connected with his own collecting and reading of them.³⁴

Reuchlin's Library

Reuchlin assembled one of the most important collections of Hebrew books owned by a Christian scholar of his time. It included printed books from the early Hebrew presses of Italy and Portugal as well as manuscripts, and he acquired many of them during his visits to Italy and through Jewish acquaintances in Germany. The manuscript of the Prophets now named after him was one of the most valuable items in this collection. There is no detailed record of how and where he acquired it, and the statements sometimes made about the date and place of its purchase rest on inference rather than on documentary evidence. What is certain is that he owned it, and that he used his Hebrew manuscripts in his study of the language and of the biblical text.³⁵³⁶

In his will Reuchlin left his library to the collegiate church of St Michael in his native town of Pforzheim. The books remained there for a time, and the library later passed into the collections of the margraves of Baden, whose residence moved from Pforzheim to Durlach and, in the eighteenth century, to the new town of Karlsruhe. In this way the Hebrew manuscripts of Reuchlin, including the codex of the Prophets, came to rest in the court library of Baden, which later became the Badische Landesbibliothek. The library suffered severe losses in the Second World War, when much of its collection was destroyed by bombing in 1942, but the Reuchlin manuscripts survived. The codex of the Prophets is today one of the principal Hebrew manuscripts of the library and is available in digital form.³⁷³⁸³⁹

The Expanded Tiberian System

The Use of Shewa

The most conspicuous feature of the pointing of the Codex Reuchlinianus is its use of shewa. In the standard Tiberian system the sign of shewa, two vertical dots below a letter, has two functions. It may represent a very short vowel, called vocal or mobile shewa, as in the first syllable of a word such as berit, covenant, or it may mark the absence of a vowel at the end of a closed syllable, called silent or quiescent shewa. The standard manuscripts do not place shewa under a final consonant at the end of a word, except in a few cases such as the final kaf and words ending in two consonants, and they do not distinguish in writing between the vocal and the silent shewa. In the Codex Reuchlinianus, by contrast, shewa is written much more widely, and in some positions a distinction appears to be made between the two kinds, so that the reader is told more about the syllable structure of each word than in the standard system.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²

A related feature is the replacement of simple shewa by the composite hataf signs. In the standard Tiberian system, the hataf signs, which combine shewa with the sign of a short vowel, are used mainly under the guttural letters alef, he, het and ayin, where a very short vowel of a particular quality was pronounced. In the expanded system the hataf signs appear under non-guttural letters as well, in positions where the scribe evidently wished to indicate that the very short vowel had a definite colour. This use has been interpreted as reflecting a pronunciation in which vocal shewa was not a neutral vowel but was assimilated to the quality of a neighbouring vowel, a phenomenon that is also attested in the descriptions of the Tiberian pronunciation by medieval grammarians.⁴³⁴⁴

Dagesh and Rafe

The second major feature of the expanded system concerns the signs dagesh and rafe. In the standard Tiberian system dagesh is used in two ways: as a sign of doubling, called dagesh forte, and as a sign of the hard or plosive pronunciation of the six letters bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe and tav, called dagesh lene. Rafe, a horizontal stroke above the letter, is used in some standard manuscripts to mark the soft pronunciation of these letters and certain other features, but it is used sparingly. In the Codex Reuchlinianus the use of both signs is greatly extended. Dagesh is written in letters and in positions where the standard manuscripts do not use it, including some letters that do not normally take dagesh at all, and rafe is written very frequently, so that in many words every consonant carries either one sign or the other.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷

The extended use of dagesh in the codex has been the subject of particular discussion. One of its most characteristic uses is the marking with dagesh of a consonant that follows a syllable ending in a consonant, even where the standard grammar does not require it, and the marking of consonants after a vocal shewa in ways that do not correspond to the standard rules. Some of these uses seem to indicate a doubled or strengthened pronunciation of the consonant, others perhaps only that the syllable boundary fell before it. The precise phonetic value of every instance is a matter of debate, and it is possible that the scribe used dagesh partly as a graphic device to show the structure of the word rather than to record a sound. What is clear is that the system as a whole provides a much more detailed and explicit indication of the reading than the standard Tiberian pointing does.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰

Vowel Signs and Their Values

A third feature concerns the vowel signs themselves. In the standard Tiberian system the signs for qamets and patah represent two different vowels, and the signs for tsere and segol represent two others. Many communities whose own pronunciation did not make these distinctions nevertheless preserved the Tiberian signs in their correct positions, because they copied them from model codices. In some manuscripts of the expanded type, however, the signs are interchanged in a way that suggests that the scribe or the vocaliser did not distinguish the vowels in his own speech. The interchange of qamets and patah, and of tsere and segol, is characteristic of a pronunciation of five vowels, which is the system attested in the Palestinian vocalisation and in the traditions descended from it. In the Codex Reuchlinianus such interchanges are less frequent than in some other manuscripts of the expanded type, but they occur, and they have been taken as evidence of the pronunciation behind the pointing.⁵¹⁵²⁵³

Accents

The accents of the Codex Reuchlinianus follow the general framework of the Tiberian system of accentuation for the twenty-one prose books, with its hierarchy of disjunctive and conjunctive signs. Here too, however, there are departures from the standard practice, especially in the use of the secondary stress mark gaʿya and of the connecting stroke called maqqef, which joins two or more words into a single unit of stress. The manuscript uses gaʿya and maqqef in many positions where the standard codices do not, and in some places the distribution of the conjunctive accents differs from that of the Aleppo and Leningrad codices. These differences are of the same kind as the differences between the schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, and some early scholars attempted to identify the pointing of the Codex Reuchlinianus with the tradition of Ben Naphtali. This identification is no longer generally accepted, since the differences between the codex and the standard tradition are much more extensive than the recorded differences between the two Tiberian masters.⁵⁴⁵⁵⁵⁶

The Pronunciation Behind the Signs

A Record of Reading

The value of the Codex Reuchlinianus for the history of the Hebrew language lies in the possibility that its pointing records a real pronunciation. Every system of vocalisation is a compromise between the sounds of the language and the signs available to represent them. The standard Tiberian system, which reflects the reading of the Masoretes of Tiberias, leaves a good deal unsaid, because its users already knew how to read the text and needed only a reminder. The expanded system, by writing shewa and dagesh and rafe in many more places, says more. If its additional signs are not merely ornamental, they provide information about the length of syllables, the doubling of consonants and the quality of reduced vowels that the standard system does not give. For this reason Shelomo Morag treated the expanded system, in his survey of the vocalisation systems of the Semitic languages, as a distinct type of Tiberian pointing reflecting a distinct tradition of pronunciation.⁵⁷

Recent research on the Tiberian pronunciation itself has made it possible to see the expanded system in a clearer light. Geoffrey Khan, in his reconstruction of the Tiberian reading tradition from the medieval grammatical treatises and from transcriptions of Hebrew into Arabic script made by Karaite scribes, has shown that the Tiberian reading included many features that the standard pointing does not mark explicitly, such as the lengthening of certain vowels in unstressed syllables, the pronunciation of vocal shewa with the quality of the following vowel before guttural letters, and the strengthening of certain consonants. Some of the additional signs of the expanded system appear to mark precisely such features. In this sense the expanded system can be seen not only as a departure from Tiberian practice but also as an attempt, in a different community, to make explicit what the Tiberian readers had known without writing it down.⁵⁸⁵⁹

Ashkenaz and the Palestinian Heritage

Eldar’s study of the Hebrew tradition of medieval Ashkenaz placed the expanded system within a wider body of evidence. From the Ashkenazi grammatical works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from the pointing of Ashkenazi Bibles and prayer books, and from the transcription of Hebrew words in Latin and in the vernacular languages of northern Europe, he reconstructed a pronunciation in which, among other things, the distinctions between qamets and patah and between tsere and segol were not consistently maintained, and in which the syllable structure differed in certain respects from the Tiberian. Many of the features of the Codex Reuchlinianus fit this reconstruction. Eldar’s work therefore supports the view that the expanded pointing reflects the pronunciation of a European Jewish community, adapted to the Tiberian signs, rather than a survival of an earlier stage of the Tiberian system itself.⁶⁰⁶¹

At the same time, the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the early Middle Ages appears to have been related to the Palestinian pronunciation, which also had five vowels and which also differed from the Tiberian in its treatment of shewa. The Jewish communities of Italy, from which the communities of the Rhineland are believed to have been founded, were in close contact with the Land of Israel during the early Middle Ages, and their liturgy and learning show many Palestinian features. It is therefore possible to describe the expanded system as Palestino-Tiberian in a historical as well as a descriptive sense: it combines the signs of the Tiberian system with a pronunciation ultimately derived from the Palestinian tradition. The article on Palestinian vocalisation on this site discusses the evidence for that tradition and its later fate in more detail.⁶²⁶³⁶⁴

Other Witnesses

The Codex Reuchlinianus is not the only manuscript with expanded Tiberian pointing, though it is the most extensive. Similar pointing is found in a number of other European manuscripts of the Bible and of rabbinic and liturgical texts, and in fragments from the Cairo Genizah that may have been written in the East. Some of these manuscripts use the expanded system consistently, others only in part, and some combine it with features of the Palestinian or Babylonian systems. Yeivin’s introduction to the Tiberian Masorah gives a survey of these manuscripts and of the features that unite and distinguish them, and later studies have added to the list. The existence of this body of material shows that the expanded pointing was not the idiosyncrasy of a single scribe but a recognised way of using the Tiberian signs, practised over a considerable area and a period of at least two centuries.⁶⁵⁶⁶

Scholarly Interpretations

Kahle and the Search for Earlier Pointing

The modern discussion of the Codex Reuchlinianus began within the larger debate about the origins of the Tiberian system that was opened by Paul Kahle in the first half of the twentieth century. Kahle, who studied the Genizah fragments with Palestinian and Babylonian pointing, believed that the Tiberian Masoretes had not simply recorded an existing pronunciation but had in some respects created an artificial one, restoring forms that they believed to be ancient. He was therefore interested in any evidence for forms of pointing that differed from the standard Tiberian, since such evidence might reveal the state of the reading tradition before the Masoretes of the Ben Asher school had fixed it. Kahle drew attention to manuscripts with non-standard Tiberian pointing and regarded some of them as representatives of a pre-Masoretic or early Masoretic stage of the tradition.⁶⁷

Sperber's Claims

Alexander Sperber, who edited the facsimile of the codex in 1956, went further than Kahle. He argued that the pointing of the Codex Reuchlinianus represented a pre-Masoretic stage of Hebrew grammar, independent of the Tiberian tradition, and that its forms could be used to reconstruct an earlier and more authentic Hebrew than that of the standard Masoretic text. In the introduction to the facsimile and in his later work on the historical grammar of Biblical Hebrew, he cited the readings of the codex as evidence for this earlier grammar. Sperber was also the editor of the standard critical edition of the Targumim, and his interest in the codex was connected with his wider view that the medieval manuscripts preserved traditions older than the work of the Masoretes.⁶⁸⁶⁹

Sperber’s interpretation was criticised by most of the scholars who studied the codex after him. The critics pointed out that the manuscript was written in the twelfth century, long after the Tiberian system had been fully developed, that its pointing used the Tiberian signs and presupposed the Tiberian framework, and that its departures from the standard tradition could be explained more simply as the adaptation of that framework to a later and different pronunciation. On this view the codex is not pre-Masoretic but post-Masoretic, and its value lies in what it reveals about the reception of the Tiberian system rather than about the state of Hebrew before it. This is now the general opinion, and it is the opinion followed in the standard handbooks of textual criticism and of the Masorah.⁷⁰⁷¹⁷²

Morag and Yeivin

The descriptive foundations for the modern understanding of the codex were laid by Shelomo Morag and Israel Yeivin. Morag, in his comparative study of the vocalisation systems of Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic published in 1962, distinguished between the standard Tiberian system and the system that he called Tiberian non-receptus, of which the Codex Reuchlinianus was the principal example. He analysed its features in relation to the other Hebrew systems and to the vocalisation of Syriac and Arabic, and he argued that it represented a genuine phonological tradition. Yeivin, in his introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, which was published in Hebrew and later translated into English by E. J. Revell, devoted a section to what he called the Palestino-Tiberian or expanded Tiberian vocalisation, listing its characteristic features and its principal manuscripts.⁷³⁷⁴

More Recent Work

The Codex and the Targum

Although the expanded vocalisation of the Hebrew text has received the most attention, the Codex Reuchlinianus is also a significant witness to Targum Jonathan, the Aramaic translation of the Prophets. Targum Jonathan was read in the synagogue alongside the prophetic lessons, the haftarot, and it was transmitted in two main traditions, the Babylonian, which is best preserved in Yemenite manuscripts with Babylonian vocalisation, and the Western, which is represented by European manuscripts with Tiberian vocalisation. The Codex Reuchlinianus is one of the most important manuscripts of the Western tradition, and it has been used in the critical study of the Targum. Its text of the Targum includes, in some places, additional Aramaic passages known as Tosefta, which expand the translation with homiletic material and which are characteristic of Western manuscripts.⁷⁵⁷⁶⁷⁷

A Place in the History of the Hebrew Bible

What the Codex Does Not Show

It is important to be clear about what the Codex Reuchlinianus does not show. Its consonantal text is the Masoretic text, and it does not preserve readings of the kind found in the Dead Sea Scrolls or in the ancient translations that diverge from the Masoretic text in substance. Its departures from the standard tradition concern the vocalisation, the accents and to some extent the Masoretic notes, not the words of the text. It is therefore not a witness to an alternative form of the Hebrew Bible, and the attempts to use its pointing as evidence for a pre-Masoretic grammar have not been sustained. For the textual critic seeking to establish the earliest recoverable form of the text, it has a limited role. Its importance lies elsewhere, in the history of the reading of the text after the Masoretes.⁷⁸⁷⁹

What the Codex Does Show

What the codex does show is that the Tiberian system, after its adoption as the standard for the Hebrew Bible, did not immediately produce uniformity in the way the text was read. The signs of Tiberias were carried across the Mediterranean and into northern Europe, but they were read in the voices of the communities that received them, and in some places the pointing was adjusted to those voices. The Codex Reuchlinianus preserves one such adjustment in unusual fullness. It thus stands at the point where the history of the Masoretic text meets the history of the Hebrew language in the Diaspora, and it offers evidence for both. In this respect it may be compared with the Yemenite manuscripts, which preserve the Babylonian tradition of reading under Tiberian signs, and with the Ashkenazi Bibles of the thirteenth century, in which the standard Tiberian pointing was again imposed by careful scribes and vocalisers.⁸⁰⁸¹⁸²

The later history of Hebrew pointing in Europe moved away from the expanded system. From the thirteenth century onward the European vocalisers known as naqdanim increasingly corrected their manuscripts against Tiberian models, and the Masoretic handbooks and grammatical works that circulated among them taught the standard rules. With the coming of printing, the standard Tiberian pointing of the Ben Asher tradition was fixed in the editions of Soncino, Venice and Antwerp, and the alternative uses of the signs disappeared from the books that most readers used. The expanded pointing survived only in manuscripts, and it was rediscovered by modern scholars as part of the history of the text rather than as a living practice. The work of the European vocalisers is described on the main site in the article on the nakdanim.⁸³⁸⁴

The Manuscript Today

The Codex Reuchlinianus remains in Karlsruhe, where it is preserved among the Reuchlin manuscripts of the Badische Landesbibliothek. Its digitisation has made it possible for anyone to examine its pointing on the page, and it continues to be cited in grammatical and Masoretic studies as the principal witness of the expanded Tiberian vocalisation. It has also acquired a modest place in the history of Christian Hebraism, as one of the manuscripts that passed through the hands of the first great Christian scholar of Hebrew in Germany. That a manuscript written by a Jewish scribe in the early twelfth century, owned by a Christian humanist in the early sixteenth, and preserved through the wars of the following centuries should now be the chief evidence for a tradition of Hebrew pronunciation otherwise known only in fragments, illustrates the complex paths by which the knowledge of the Hebrew Bible has been transmitted.⁸⁵⁸⁶⁸⁷

Notes

1. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
2. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
3. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
4. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Babylonian vocalization”. ↩
6. Grokipedia, “Tiberian vocalization”. ↩
7. See also “Palestinian Vocalisation: The Pointing of the Land of Israel” on this site. ↩
8. See also “Babylonian Vocalisation: The Eastern Pointing of the Hebrew Bible” on this site. ↩
9. Grokipedia, “Niqqud”. ↩
10. Grokipedia, “Shewa”. ↩
11. Grokipedia, “Dagesh”. ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Rafe”. ↩
13. Grokipedia, “Hebrew cantillation”. ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Aaron ben Moses ben Asher”. ↩
15. Grokipedia, “Aleppo Codex”. ↩
16. See also “The Tiberian Masorah and the Schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali” on this site. ↩
17. See also “The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard” on this site. ↩
18. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959). ↩
19. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
20. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020). ↩
21. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Targum Jonathan”. ↩
23. See also “Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel and the Targumim of the Prophets and Writings” on this site. ↩
24. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
25. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
26. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
27. Ilan Eldar, The Hebrew Language Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz (ca. 950–1350 C.E.), 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1978), in Hebrew. ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Ashkenazi Jews”. ↩
29. See also “The Erfurt Hebrew Bibles and the Ashkenazi Scribal Tradition” on this site. ↩
30. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
31. Geoffrey Khan, A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and Its Reading Tradition, 2nd ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). ↩
32. Ludwig Geiger, Johann Reuchlin: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1871). ↩
33. Grokipedia, “Johann Reuchlin”. ↩
34. David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩
35. Ludwig Geiger, Johann Reuchlin: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1871). ↩
36. David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩
37. Digital collections of the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe. ↩
38. Grokipedia, “Pforzheim”. ↩
39. Grokipedia, “Karlsruhe”. ↩
40. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
41. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
42. Grokipedia, “Shewa”. ↩
43. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
44. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020). ↩
45. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
46. Grokipedia, “Dagesh”. ↩
47. Grokipedia, “Rafe”. ↩
48. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
49. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020). ↩
50. Ilan Eldar, The Hebrew Language Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz (ca. 950–1350 C.E.), 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1978), in Hebrew. ↩
51. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
53. See also “Palestinian Vocalisation: The Pointing of the Land of Israel” on this site. ↩
54. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
55. See also “The Tiberian Masorah and the Schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali” on this site. ↩
56. Grokipedia, “Hebrew cantillation”. ↩
57. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
58. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020). ↩
59. Geoffrey Khan, A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and Its Reading Tradition, 2nd ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). ↩
60. Ilan Eldar, The Hebrew Language Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz (ca. 950–1350 C.E.), 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1978), in Hebrew. ↩
61. Grokipedia, “Ashkenazi Jews”. ↩
62. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
63. See also “Palestinian Vocalisation: The Pointing of the Land of Israel” on this site. ↩
64. See also “The Erfurt Hebrew Bibles and the Ashkenazi Scribal Tradition” on this site. ↩
65. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
66. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959). ↩
67. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959). ↩
68. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
69. Grokipedia, “Targum Jonathan”. ↩
70. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
71. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
72. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
73. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
74. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
75. Alexander Sperber, ed., Codex Reuchlinianus No. 3 of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, Corpus Codicum Hebraicorum Medii Aevi, part 2, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956). ↩
76. Grokipedia, “Targum Jonathan”. ↩
77. See also “Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel and the Targumim of the Prophets and Writings” on this site. ↩
78. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
79. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
80. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
81. Ilan Eldar, The Hebrew Language Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz (ca. 950–1350 C.E.), 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1978), in Hebrew. ↩
82. See also “The Erfurt Hebrew Bibles and the Ashkenazi Scribal Tradition” on this site. ↩
83. See also “The Nakdanim” on the main site. ↩
84. See also “The Antwerp, Paris and London Polyglots” on this site. ↩
85. Digital collections of the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe. ↩
86. Grokipedia, “Johann Reuchlin”. ↩
87. Grokipedia, “Karlsruhe”. ↩