From Vellum to Unicode: The Westminster Leningrad Codex

The Hebrew text of the Bible most widely read on screens today descends from a single parchment book. The Leningrad Codex, copied in Cairo in the year 1008 or 1009 and now kept in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible with the vowel points, accents and Masoretic notes of the Tiberian tradition. In the twentieth century it became the basis of the standard printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, and from the 1980s onwards its text was transcribed into electronic form, corrected against photographs of the manuscript, and finally encoded in the international character standard known as Unicode. The resulting text, the Westminster Leningrad Codex, is the source of the Hebrew in a large proportion of the Bible software, websites and digital editions now in use.¹² This article describes how the text passed from the manuscript to the printed editions and from the printed editions to digital form, and the problems of representing the Masoretic text in a computer.³

The Manuscript

The Codex of 1008

The Leningrad Codex is a parchment book of 491 leaves, written in three columns to the page, with Masoretic notes in the margins and decorated carpet pages at the end. Its colophon states that it was written, pointed and furnished with Masorah by Samuel ben Jacob in Fustat, Old Cairo, and that it was corrected from books prepared by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last and most celebrated member of the Ben Asher family of Masoretes in Tiberias. The date is given in several eras, which correspond to the year 1008 or 1009 of the common era.⁴⁵

The manuscript was acquired in the nineteenth century by the Karaite collector Abraham Firkovich and entered the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg with his collection in 1863. Its shelf mark is Firkovich B 19 A. After the city was renamed Leningrad in 1924, the manuscript came to be called the Leningrad Codex, and the name has been retained in scholarship since the city recovered its old name in 1991. The history and contents of the manuscript are described in more detail in The Leningrad Codex and The Leningrad Codex B19a.⁶⁷

Its Relation to the Aleppo Codex

The older Aleppo Codex, written in the early tenth century and pointed by Aaron ben Asher himself, was regarded in the Middle Ages as the model manuscript of the Tiberian text. It was, however, damaged in 1947, and about a third of it, including most of the Pentateuch, is now lost. The Leningrad Codex is closely related to it in its consonants, vowels and accents, though not identical, and it is complete. For these reasons it has become the most practical basis for an edition of the whole Hebrew Bible according to the Ben Asher tradition. The Aleppo Codex is discussed in The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard.⁸⁹

From Manuscript to Printed Edition

Kittel, Kahle and the Third Edition of Biblia Hebraica

Until the twentieth century, printed Hebrew Bibles were based on the Second Rabbinic Bible edited by Jacob ben Hayyim and printed in Venice in 1524 and 1525, a text compiled from late medieval manuscripts. The first two editions of the Biblia Hebraica edited by Rudolf Kittel, published in 1906 and 1913, also followed this text. In the 1920s the orientalist Paul Kahle, who had made a long study of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and of the Masoretic traditions of the East and West, persuaded Kittel and the publishers that a new edition should be based instead on an early manuscript of the Ben Asher tradition.¹⁰¹¹¹²

Since the Aleppo Codex was not then accessible for photography, Kahle chose the Leningrad Codex. The manuscript was lent to Leipzig and photographed there, and the third edition of Biblia Hebraica, issued in parts from 1929 and completed in 1937, printed its text, including its Masorah parva in the margins. Kahle described the choice and its consequences in his later book on the Cairo Geniza. This was the first time that a printed Bible had followed a single early manuscript of the Tiberian tradition, and the decision determined the text of the standard scholarly editions for the rest of the century.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia

The fourth edition, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph and published in fascicles between 1967 and 1977, retained the Leningrad Codex as its base text. The editors printed the text of the manuscript with relatively few departures, revised the critical apparatus at the foot of the page, and printed the Masorah parva in a revised form in the margin, with references to a separate edition of the Masorah magna prepared by Gérard Weil. The edition became the standard text for scholarly study of the Hebrew Bible in much of the world.¹⁶¹⁷

The editors of BHS did not, however, reproduce the manuscript exactly in every detail. In a number of places they corrected what they regarded as obvious scribal errors, and the printed text also contained typographical errors of its own. The differences were small in number, but they were to become important when the text was put into electronic form, because the electronic text derived from the printed edition rather than directly from the manuscript.¹⁸¹⁹

Further editions have followed. Aron Dotan’s Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia of 2001 printed the text of the codex in a single compact volume with minimal apparatus, and the fifth edition of the Stuttgart series, Biblia Hebraica Quinta, has been appearing in fascicles since 2004, again on the basis of the Leningrad Codex. It is described in Biblia Hebraica Quinta: The Fifth Edition of the Hebrew Bible.²⁰²¹

The First Electronic Text

Computers and the Hebrew Bible

The use of computers in biblical studies began in the 1960s and 1970s with projects to compile concordances and statistical analyses of vocabulary. These projects required the text in machine-readable form, and since the computers of the time could not display Hebrew characters, the text was represented in transliteration, using the letters, numbers and punctuation available on a standard keyboard. Each consonant, vowel point and accent was assigned a code, and the encoded text could then be sorted, counted and searched.²²

Several such texts were prepared independently. The one that became most widely used was keyed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a group of scholars associated with the University of Michigan and with Claremont, among them H. Van Dyke Parunak and Richard E. Whitaker, from the printed text of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Known as the Michigan–Claremont text, it encoded consonants, vowels and accents in a system of transliteration devised for the purpose. It was distributed among scholars through the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts at the University of Pennsylvania, directed by Robert Kraft and Emanuel Tov, and through the Oxford Text Archive.²³²⁴

The Work at Westminster

In the second half of the 1980s the text was taken up at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania, by J. Alan Groves, who used it as the basis of a morphological analysis of the Hebrew Bible. Morphology in this sense means the identification of every word by its root, its grammatical form and its part of speech, so that a computer can answer questions about grammar as well as vocabulary. The Westminster Hebrew Morphology, built over the following decade, became one of the principal databases of its kind and was licensed to the developers of several Bible software programmes.²⁵²⁶

The work of morphology required a closer examination of the underlying text. Groves and his colleagues found that the Michigan–Claremont transcription contained errors of its own and that it reproduced the departures of BHS from the manuscript. They began a systematic revision of the text, comparing it first with the printed edition and then, when it became possible, with photographs of the manuscript. The revised text was called the Westminster Leningrad Codex, to distinguish it from both the printed BHS and the original Michigan–Claremont transcription.²⁷

Checking the Text against the Manuscript

The Photographs of 1990

In 1990 a team of the West Semitic Research Project, led by Bruce Zuckerman and Kenneth Zuckerman of the University of Southern California, travelled to St Petersburg to photograph the Leningrad Codex. They used large-format film, colour and black and white, and took particular care to record the faint vowel points and accents. The photographs were published in 1998 by Eerdmans and Brill as The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition, edited by David Noel Freedman, Astrid Beck and James A. Sanders.²⁸

The facsimile made it possible for the first time for scholars without access to St Petersburg to check the text of the manuscript directly and in detail. The Westminster team used it to compare the electronic text with the codex page by page, and recorded every place where the electronic text, BHS or the manuscript differed. Where the manuscript could be read, its reading was adopted; where it was damaged or unclear, the text noted the uncertainty.²⁹³⁰

Recording the Differences

The result was a text that aimed to represent the manuscript itself rather than any printed edition. The Westminster Leningrad Codex marked its departures from BHS with a series of notes, distinguishing, for example, places where BHS had corrected the manuscript, places where BHS contained a typographical error, places where the manuscript had an unusual form that the text retained, and places where the reading of the manuscript was uncertain. The notes allowed users to see how the electronic text related to both the printed edition and the codex.³¹

Most of the differences are minor. They concern the placement of a vowel or accent, the presence or absence of a meteg, the secondary stress mark, or the form of a letter written large or small. They have no effect on the meaning of the text in most cases. Their importance lies in the principle that a digital text should be an accurate representation of a known source, and that its differences from that source should be documented.³²³³

What Had to Be Encoded

Consonants, Vowels and Accents

The text of the Leningrad Codex is written in three layers. The first is the consonantal text, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet with their five final forms, which had been fixed long before the Masoretes and which they did not alter. The second is the system of vowel points, the small dots and dashes written above, below and within the letters to indicate the pronunciation that had been handed down orally. The third is the system of accents, or cantillation marks, which indicate the stressed syllable of each word, the division of the verse into phrases, and the melody used in public reading.³⁴³⁵

Each of these layers had to be represented in the electronic text. The consonants presented no difficulty, but the vowels and accents were more complex. The Tiberian system distinguishes some thirty accents, several of which have the same shape but different functions, and the system used in the three poetical books of Psalms, Proverbs and Job differs from that used in the other twenty-one books. A single word may carry two accents, and the position of an accent relative to the letter can be significant. The encoders had to decide how to record each of these distinctions so that it could be searched and displayed correctly.³⁶³⁷

Qere and Ketiv

A further complication is the system by which the Masoretes indicated that a word should be read differently from the way it is written. In such cases, called ketiv and qere, the consonants of the written form are left in the text, but they are given the vowels of the form to be read, and the consonants of the form to be read are written in the margin. A printed or electronic text must decide how to present this: whether to print the written consonants with the vowels of the reading, as the manuscript does, or to separate the two forms. The Westminster text records both forms, marking the written form and the form to be read so that each can be displayed or searched.³⁸³⁹

Versions and Corrections

The Westminster Leningrad Codex has been issued in a series of numbered versions, each recording the corrections made since the last. The changes are listed in the release notes, with the book, chapter, verse and word affected and the nature of the change. Many corrections arose from users who reported places where the text seemed to differ from the facsimile, and each report was checked against the photographs before a change was made. The cumulative record of these corrections is itself a document of the care that the transcription has received.⁴⁰

The procedure resembles in some respects the work of the Masoretes themselves. They too counted, compared and recorded, and their notes were designed to ensure that each copy of the text would agree with its model in every letter, vowel and accent. The digital editors had different tools and different purposes, but their aim of a text that faithfully reproduces a known model, and that documents every point at which it departs from it, places them within the same tradition of careful transmission.⁴¹⁴²

Encoding in Unicode

From Transliteration to Hebrew Characters

The Michigan–Claremont text and its early Westminster revisions were stored in transliteration because computers could not easily display Hebrew. The development of Unicode in the 1990s changed this. Unicode is an international standard that assigns a unique number to every character in the world’s writing systems, so that text can be exchanged between different computers and programmes without loss. Its Hebrew block includes the consonants, the final forms, the vowel points, the cantillation accents and several special marks used in the Masoretic text.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵

The conversion of the Westminster text into Unicode allowed it to be displayed and searched in Hebrew script on ordinary computers and in web browsers. The Westminster Leningrad Codex was issued in Unicode and in XML, a structured format that marks the books, chapters, verses and words of the text and the notes attached to them. In this form it was released for general use, with the consonants, vowels and accents of the manuscript.⁴⁶⁴⁷

The Problem of Order

The encoding of the Hebrew Bible in Unicode raised technical problems that had not arisen with modern Hebrew. In the Masoretic text a single letter may carry several marks: a vowel below, an accent above or below, a dagesh within, and sometimes a meteg or a second accent. Unicode treats these marks as combining characters, and it assigns each a combining class that determines the order in which they should be stored when a text is normalised for comparison or searching.⁴⁸⁴⁹

The combining classes originally assigned to the Hebrew points had been designed for simpler uses, and when Masoretic texts were normalised according to the standard, certain combinations of vowels and accents could be reordered in ways that changed the meaning or display of the text. The most familiar examples involve a letter carrying two vowels, as in the traditional pointing of the name of Jerusalem, or a vowel and a meteg in an unusual order. Because the Unicode Consortium does not change combining classes once they have been assigned, the problem could not be solved by changing them.⁵⁰⁵¹

The solution adopted, after discussion between the Unicode Technical Committee, the Society of Biblical Literature and font designers, was to recommend the use of an invisible character, the combining grapheme joiner, to preserve the intended order of marks where normalisation would otherwise alter it, and to provide additional characters for some special marks of the Masoretic text. Fonts designed for biblical Hebrew, such as SBL Hebrew, released by the Society of Biblical Literature in 2003, and Ezra SIL, were designed to display the full range of points and accents correctly.⁵²⁵³

Special Marks and Unusual Forms

The Masoretic text includes a number of features that are not part of ordinary Hebrew writing: letters written larger or smaller than the others, suspended letters written above the line, the inverted nun that marks a passage in Numbers, dots placed above certain words, and the distinction between open and closed paragraphs. Some of these are represented in Unicode by special characters, and others are marked in the XML of the Westminster text by notes or attributes. The Westminster team’s practice was to record the feature as it appears in the manuscript and to provide a note describing it, so that a display programme could show it appropriately.⁵⁴⁵⁵

Distribution and Use

Bible Software

The Westminster Leningrad Codex, with the Westminster Hebrew Morphology, became the Hebrew text of several of the most widely used programmes for the study of the Bible, which licensed the morphology and often the text with it. Through these programmes a large number of students, translators and scholars came to read the Hebrew Bible in the form of the Westminster text, often without being aware of its relation to the manuscript. The history of these programmes is discussed in Logos, Accordance, BibleWorks and the Consumer Bible Software Tradition.⁵⁶

Open Projects

Because the text of the Leningrad Codex itself is not under copyright, and because the Westminster team released its text without restrictions on reuse, the Westminster Leningrad Codex became the basis of several open projects. The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, an independent collaboration, added a freely licensed morphology and lemmatisation to the text, and its data are used in numerous websites and applications. Other projects have used the text for reading editions, audio Bibles and linguistic research.⁵⁷

The Groves Center and Its Successor

After J. Alan Groves died in 2007, the work at Westminster was continued by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research, which issued further corrected versions of the text. In the following decade the work passed to an independent successor, which maintains the text under the name of the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex and publishes it, with its notes and change history, at tanach.us. The text has continued to be corrected when new examination of the manuscript images shows an error, and each change is recorded.⁵⁸

What the Digital Text Represents

One Manuscript, Not the Masoretic Text as a Whole

The Westminster Leningrad Codex is a transcription of one manuscript. It is not a critical edition and it does not attempt to reconstruct an original text of the Hebrew Bible or even an ideal Ben Asher text. Where the Leningrad Codex differs from the Aleppo Codex or from other early Tiberian manuscripts, the electronic text follows the Leningrad Codex. Its value lies precisely in this limitation: it reproduces an actual, dated and well-preserved manuscript, and its departures from that manuscript are documented.⁵⁹⁶⁰

Users of digital Bibles sometimes treat the text on their screens as if it were simply the Hebrew Bible. Textual critics have pointed out that every edition, whether printed or digital, represents choices, and that the choice of the Leningrad Codex as a base text was made in the 1920s for practical reasons by Paul Kahle and his collaborators. The prevalence of the Westminster text in software has strengthened the position of the Leningrad Codex as the standard form of the Masoretic text, but it has not changed the fact that it is one witness among many.⁶¹⁶²

Accuracy and Correction

The history of the electronic text shows how errors can enter a text and how they can be removed. The Michigan–Claremont text inherited the editorial corrections and typographical errors of BHS and added its own errors of keying. The Westminster revision removed many of these by comparison with the facsimile, and later versions have continued the process. Because a digital text can be corrected and redistributed at once, and because its changes can be recorded precisely, it has an advantage over a printed edition in this respect. The same ease of copying, however, means that uncorrected older versions continue to circulate, and users of the text in software may not know which version they have.⁶³⁶⁴

The Masorah

The Westminster text represents the consonants, vowels and accents of the Leningrad Codex, but not the Masorah parva and Masorah magna that surround the text in the manuscript. These notes, which count words and letters, record unusual forms and guard the text against error, are a central part of the work of the Masoretes. They are printed in BHS and BHQ but have not been fully encoded in the Westminster text. The digitisation of the Masoretic notes remains a separate and more difficult task, because they are written in abbreviated Aramaic and Hebrew, and their interpretation requires specialist knowledge. The Masoretic notes are discussed in The Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna.⁶⁵

Conclusion

The Westminster Leningrad Codex links a parchment book copied in Cairo in 1008 or 1009 with the screens on which the Hebrew Bible is now most often read. Its path ran through Paul Kahle’s decision to base the third edition of Biblia Hebraica on the Leningrad Codex, through the keying of the Michigan–Claremont text from Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, through the correction of that text at Westminster Theological Seminary against the facsimile photographs of 1990, and through its encoding in Unicode, which required solving problems in the representation of points and accents that ordinary Hebrew had never raised. The result is a transcription of a single manuscript, documented in its departures from that manuscript and from the printed editions, and freely available. It has made the text of the Leningrad Codex the most widely used form of the Hebrew Bible, and it illustrates the care required to carry the work of the Masoretes into a new medium.⁶⁶⁶⁷⁶⁸

Notes

1. Grokipedia, “Leningrad Codex”. ↩
2. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
3. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
4. David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, eds, The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Aaron ben Moses ben Asher”. ↩
6. David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, eds, The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Leningrad Codex”. ↩
8. Grokipedia, “Aleppo Codex”. ↩
9. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
10. Rudolf Kittel and Paul Kahle, eds, Biblia Hebraica, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1929–1937). ↩
11. Paul Kahle, Masoreten des Westens, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1927–1930). ↩
12. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
13. Rudolf Kittel and Paul Kahle, eds, Biblia Hebraica, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1929–1937). ↩
14. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959). ↩
15. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
16. Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, eds, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1967–1977; 5th edn, 1997). ↩
17. Grokipedia, “Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia”. ↩
18. Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, eds, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1967–1977; 5th edn, 1997). ↩
19. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
20. Aron Dotan, ed., Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001). ↩
21. Adrian Schenker et al., eds, Biblia Hebraica Quinta (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2004–). ↩
22. Emanuel Tov, “The Use of Computers in Biblical Research”, in The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 3–27. ↩
23. Emanuel Tov, “The Use of Computers in Biblical Research”, in The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 3–27. ↩
24. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
25. Grokipedia, “Westminster Theological Seminary”. ↩
26. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
27. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
28. David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, eds, The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
29. David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, eds, The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
30. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
31. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
32. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
33. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
34. Grokipedia, “Niqqud”. ↩
35. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
36. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
37. The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, chapter 9, “Middle East I: Hebrew”, current version (Mountain View: Unicode Consortium). ↩
38. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
39. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
40. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
41. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
42. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
43. Grokipedia, “Unicode”. ↩
44. The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, chapter 9, “Middle East I: Hebrew”, current version (Mountain View: Unicode Consortium). ↩
45. Grokipedia, “Hebrew alphabet”. ↩
46. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
47. The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, chapter 9, “Middle East I: Hebrew”, current version (Mountain View: Unicode Consortium). ↩
48. Grokipedia, “Unicode equivalence”. ↩
49. The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, chapter 9, “Middle East I: Hebrew”, current version (Mountain View: Unicode Consortium). ↩
50. Grokipedia, “Unicode equivalence”. ↩
51. John Hudson, ed., SBL Hebrew Font User Manual (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003; rev. 2004). ↩
52. John Hudson, ed., SBL Hebrew Font User Manual (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003; rev. 2004). ↩
53. The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, chapter 9, “Middle East I: Hebrew”, current version (Mountain View: Unicode Consortium). ↩
54. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
55. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
56. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
57. Open Scriptures, Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible. ↩
58. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
59. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
60. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
61. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
62. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
63. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩
64. Emanuel Tov, “The Use of Computers in Biblical Research”, in The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 3–27. ↩
65. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
66. David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, eds, The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998). ↩
67. Rudolf Kittel and Paul Kahle, eds, Biblia Hebraica, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1929–1937). ↩
68. Groves Center and successors, Tanach.us: the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex. ↩