Israel Yeivin and the Description of the Pointed Bible

In 1925 a two-year-old boy from Berlin arrived in Palestine with his family. He would spend the rest of his life in Jerusalem, in a university department of the Hebrew language, and he would write the books from which later scholars still describe the vowels, accents and notes of the early Hebrew Bibles. The public record of that life is short, and the hub note on Israel Yeivin gathers what the published notices will safely support. This essay watches the books themselves at work. Yeivin’s study of the vocalisation and accentuation of the Aleppo Codex, his volumes on Babylonian vocalisation, and the English Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah are still the handbooks a later writer opens for a dated manuscript list, a term from the Masorah, or a comparison between the Tiberian and Babylonian traditions. The aim here is to follow those books into the scholarship that cites them with page and paragraph, and to see what kind of description they made possible.

From Berlin to a Jerusalem Career

The Encyclopaedia Judaica identifies him as the son of Yehoshua Heschel Yeivin, records that he was born in Berlin in 1923, and that he came to Palestine with his family in 1925. He became professor in the Hebrew language department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In parallel he supervised the section of ancient literature in the historical dictionary of the Hebrew language undertaken by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and he carried out research on ancient biblical manuscripts for the Hebrew University Bible Project. In 1989 he received the Israel Prize for research in the Hebrew language. The same entry lists, as his principal books, the Aleppo Codex study, the work on the Hebrew language tradition reflected in the Babylonian vocalisation, and Ha-Masorah la-Miqra.¹

Two official notices add a little to that sketch and fix its ends. In the academic year 1987–1988 Yeivin was a fellow of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, as a member of a research group on the grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew.² In 1991 he was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, in its humanities division, with Hebrew language as his academic field and the Hebrew University as his institution. The Academy’s record gives the date of his death as 19 December 2008.³ The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry, written while he was alive, gives only the year of his birth. Later accounts sometimes offer a full date of birth; those could not be verified from the sources used here, and they are not repeated.

That is already enough to place the books. Yeivin worked in Jerusalem, in a department of the Hebrew language rather than in a faculty of Bible alone, and in two long institutional projects that needed exactly the skills his publications display: a historical dictionary that had to describe ancient Hebrew from texts, and a Bible edition that had chosen the Aleppo Codex as its base. The founder of that edition is the subject of the hub page on Moshe Goshen-Gottstein. The rest of this essay is about the books themselves, as later writers have used them.

A Study of Vocalisation and Accentuation

Yeivin’s first major book was a study of the vocalisation and accentuation of the Aleppo Codex, published by the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University. The English title page reads The Aleppo Codex of the Bible: A Study of its Vocalization and Accentuation. Library records give the year of publication as 1968; the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1969, a discrepancy that probably reflects the difference between the Hebrew and civil years in which the book appeared.⁴ The book belongs to the research on biblical manuscripts that Yeivin carried out for the Hebrew University Bible Project, and, as its title states, it describes the vowel signs and accents of Aaron ben Asher’s manuscript in detail. It does more than that. Later scholars have used it as a comparative survey of the early Tiberian manuscripts that can be set beside the Aleppo Codex, and as a first mapping of how those manuscripts differ from one another in the smaller signs as well as in the large choices of tradition.

Geoffrey Khan, in the introduction to his study of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition, turns to that book when he places the oldest leaves of British Library, Or. 4445, the subject of the hub page on Codex Orientales 4445, in relation to the Aleppo Codex and to the Leningrad Codex. Those leaves, which constitute most of the Pentateuch in the manuscript, are generally thought to have been written in the first half of the tenth century, at the same period as the Aleppo Codex, or possibly slightly earlier. In the recorded differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naftali they agree with Ben Asher in 80 percent of cases. They mark hatef signs on non-guttural consonants slightly more frequently than the corresponding portions of Leningrad, in accordance with the principles found in Aleppo. The marking of the ga’ya in open syllables is, however, less frequent than in Aleppo, and the rafe sign is used on consonants outside the familiar bgdkpt set less often than in Aleppo. The manuscript appears, on that evidence, to represent a slightly less developed tradition than Aaron ben Asher’s book. Khan cites Yeivin’s study, at pages 359–60, among the authorities for this comparison.⁵

The same book is cited a page later for the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. That manuscript, long preserved in the Karaite synagogue in Cairo, has a colophon attributing it to Moshe ben Asher, the father of Aaron, with the date 895. There is now a consensus that the manuscript was written later, most likely in the eleventh century, and that the colophon is a later copy of an earlier one. In the recorded differences it agrees with Ben Asher in 33 percent of cases and with Ben Naftali in 64 percent. It marks the ga’ya in open syllables, and the dagesh in a consonantal alef, more frequently than either Aleppo or Leningrad. Khan cites Yeivin, at pages 360–61, for those observations.⁶

The study also recorded a practice of the model Tiberian codices that later work on pronunciation has had to take into account. In a chapter on Hebrew vocalisation signs in Karaite Arabic-script transcriptions of the Bible, Khan notes the occasional marking of hatef vowels on non-guttural consonants in Leningrad and in Or. 4445, and he refers the reader to Yeivin, at page 18, together with a later study by Aron Dotan, for the practice in the model codices.⁷ The point is a small one, of the kind that fills a handbook and then quietly governs later description. It is also typical of Yeivin’s method as later writers present it: the claim is not a theory of the tradition in the abstract, but a report of what particular early manuscripts do with a particular sign.

Manuscripts Placed beside the Codex

When Yeivin was preparing the Aleppo study he did not confine the comparison to the two or three most famous books. Kim Phillips has recalled that, among the manuscripts of the Russian National Library, EVR I Bibl. 80 and EVR I B 13 are sections from a single codex of the Former Prophets. Yeivin included that manuscript among those close to the Aleppo Codex and labelled it L17. For some years it was readily accessible only through the microfilm collection of the National Library of Israel. Phillips, writing in 2017 after high-resolution digital images of many of those microfilms had been released, adopted Yeivin’s label and went on to attribute the book to Samuel ben Jacob, the scribe of the Leningrad Codex.⁸ The label itself, and the judgment of closeness that it records, are Yeivin’s. The attribution to Samuel is later work, and it depends on a kind of comparison, of fillers, seder markers, and habits of the Masorah, that the 1968 study had made it possible to undertake in an orderly way.

Phillips also uses the Aleppo study, at page 372, among the modern references for the physical description of L17, beside the older catalogue of Albert Harkavy and Hermann Strack, who had already described the manuscript in St Petersburg in 1875.⁹ The same article shows why a catalogue description and a study of pointing are not the same kind of book, and why both were needed. Harkavy and Strack had already seen that the colophon of L17 does not give the impression of great age, and that the manuscript itself could have been written at the end of the tenth century or during the eleventh. The colophon presupposes an earlier date, but the repeated mentions of Ben Asher and Ben Naftali in the Masorah, among other factors, make that early date implausible. Their reasoning, Phillips notes, is cogent: the multiple references to those two Masoretes make it virtually impossible that the codex was written before 938, while Aaron ben Asher was still alive, and possibly even before he had completed the Aleppo Codex. The end of the tenth century would appear to be the earliest possible date. Yeivin agrees, in the later Introduction, at page 27, suggesting a date around 975.¹⁰

The 1968 study also helped later writers to keep similar books distinct. Richard Gottheil had described, in the Karaite synagogue in Cairo, a large parchment manuscript of the Former Prophets, magnificently written, three columns to the page, with plentiful Masorah, and already going to pieces because of damp. The description is close enough to L17 that one might wonder whether they are the same book. They are not. Yeivin noted, in a brief description, that the Cairo manuscript, which he renamed 2q in order to distinguish it from a Torah codex once associated with it, has nineteen lines per column, unlike L17’s seventeen. Moreover, L17 was already in St Petersburg by 1875, whereas 2q was still in Cairo in the twentieth century.¹¹ Phillips adheres to Yeivin’s terminology for that book. The later essays in which Yeivin returned to individual manuscripts close to the Aleppo Codex, including a study of a manuscript labelled L11 in Textus and a study of a manuscript from the Karaite synagogue in Cairo labelled C1, in the memorial volume for Goshen-Gottstein, belong to the same comparative programme.¹²

The cumulative effect of this work, as Phillips and Mordecai Breuer have been taken to agree, is a picture of a Standard Tiberian circle rather than of a single perfect copy. Even agreeing with Yeivin and Breuer that the Aleppo Codex represents the current closest approach to the centre of that circle, Phillips writes, a fuller grasp of the area and perimeter of the circle remains a desideratum.¹³ That sentence is a fair statement of what Yeivin’s first major book made possible, and of what it did not pretend to finish.

Notes that Crossed a Frontier

The Aleppo study was not only a book about vowels and accents. It also recorded, in the Masoretic notes of Tiberian manuscripts, material that had come from the Babylonian tradition. In a later report on the Masoretic notes of the manuscript RNL EVR II B 80+, Phillips observes that most of the well-known Tiberian manuscripts contain a certain amount of masoretic material originating from a Babylonian source, a demonstration in which he places Yeivin’s pages 72–75 beside later work by Breuer, Yosef Ofer and Aron Dotan. At one end of the spectrum the Babylonian influence is very slight, as in the Aleppo Codex; in other manuscripts, including Or. 4445, the influence is more pronounced; in still others, such as Sassoon 1053, it is rather substantial.¹⁴

How that influence should be read is a question on which later work has not always followed Yeivin without hesitation. In one note in the Aleppo Codex, concerned with the distinction between he and het and written with Babylonian vowel signs, Yeivin, at page 73, denies that the presence of Babylonian vocalisation in the Masorah magna of the Aleppo Codex implies any dependence on the Babylonian Masorah on the part of that manuscript. Ofer, considering the same note, is more hesitant. On the basis of the interest in the he/het distinction and of the Babylonian vowel signs, he suggests that it is possible the note was copied from a Babylonian source, without being able to be more definite.¹⁵ The disagreement is narrow and carefully stated, and it is the kind of disagreement a good handbook invites. Yeivin had seen the signs and had refused a larger inference. A later specialist, with a fuller edition of the Babylonian Masorah of the Pentateuch in hand, is willing to reopen the inference for a single note, and still stops short of certainty.

The same pages of the 1968 study stand behind later discussion of particular Babylonian terms that appear in Tiberian notes. Phillips, reviewing the history of scholarship on those terms, places Yeivin, at pages 74–75, among the scholars who have argued about the diagnostic value of the term shelama, “plene,” the Babylonian equivalent of Tiberian male, as an indicator of Babylonian origin. He also notes that some terms which seem to have started out as Babylonian have made their way so thoroughly into the Tiberian Masorah that it is debatable whether they should still be considered distinctively Babylonian at all. For lists of such terms he refers the reader to Paul Kahle, to Yeivin’s later Hebrew handbook of 2003, at pages 93–95, and especially to Ofer, whose list contains far more “Babylonian” terms than does Yeivin’s.¹⁶ A handbook, on this evidence, is not the last word on a list. It is the list from which a later list can be seen to have grown.

A Handbook for English Readers

Yeivin’s best-known book in the English-speaking world is the Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, translated and edited by E. J. Revell and published by Scholars Press in 1980 as volume 5 of the series Masoretic Studies of the Society of Biblical Literature.¹⁷ The book opens with a description of the principal Tiberian manuscripts. Phillips, when he needs a compact account of the Aleppo Codex, Or. 4445, the Cairo Codex, the Leningrad Codex, and the two Sassoon manuscripts commonly abbreviated S and S1, refers his readers to pages 15–22 of that introduction.¹⁸ A page or two later the same book supplies the abbreviations themselves. Khan, noting that the scribe Shelomo ben Buya’a, who wrote the consonants of the Aleppo Codex, also wrote the manuscript I Firkovitch II.17, adds that this is L1 according to the abbreviation of Yeivin, at pages 22–23, and that the naqdan of L1 was not the naqdan of Aleppo, so that the vocalisation and accentuation differ.¹⁹ The nakdanim of a later age were often specialists in pointing, distinct from the copyist of the letters. Yeivin’s list of manuscripts already records cases in which those tasks were divided, and cases, such as the Leningrad Codex written by Samuel ben Jacob, in which they were not.

The later parts of the Introduction treat the forms and terminology of the Masorah parva and Masorah magna, the lists, and the kinds of information the notes record, before turning to the vowel signs and to the accents of the twenty-one prose books and of the three poetic books, Psalms, Proverbs and Job. The book became the usual starting point for students who need to read the notes in the margins of a Masoretic manuscript or of a modern edition. It is also, in later specialised work, the first place a writer goes for a disputed sign.

Vincent Beiler’s study of the marginal letter that has been read as a nun or a zayin is a clear example. For the types of qere marking, including ketiv we-la qere, qere we-la ketiv and related forms, he refers the reader to Yeivin, at pages 56–59, and then groups those types together for convenience.²⁰ On the marginal letter itself he reports Yeivin’s observations at page 52: that the marking has been thought ancient, perhaps predating the remainder of the Masorah magna and parva; that the letter generally fell out of use after the twelfth century, though later examples have since been found; that if the sign is a zayin it might stand for zitima, “uncertain”; and that the letter could even be a simple marking and not a letter at all. Kahle had suggested that a final nun stood for qaryan, “what is read,” a solution which Yeivin, at the same page, dismissed as “astonishing.” Beiler tends to agree, finding no precedent in the Masorah parva for the use of a final form to indicate a non-final letter.²¹ When the same letter occurs in the Cairo Codex without an explicit qere, often in conjunction with the term yattir, “superfluous,” Beiler notes that Yeivin, at page 94, regarded that term as occurring in “qere/ketiv situations.”²² A neighbouring page of the Introduction, 46–47, is cited when Beiler discusses signs used to mark text that is out of place, in connection with the inverted nuns and with Greek parallels.²³

None of this is a substitute for reading the manuscripts. It is the condition under which later reading of the manuscripts can be reported in a common language. Beiler can disagree with a proposed expansion, record a later find that qualifies Yeivin’s date for the decline of the sign, and still use the Introduction as the book in which the options were first set out for an English-speaking reader. The same is true of smaller observations that later pronunciation work has needed. Khan cites Yeivin, at paragraph 105, together with studies by Ofer, for the fact that differences between qere and ketiv are already mentioned in rabbinic literature, a point that bears on the question whether some qere notes were compiled before the creation of the vowel signs.²⁴ He also cites the Introduction for the placement of the mappiq and for related details of pointing, at pages 285–86, and, at page 27, as already noted, for the dating of L17.²⁵

The Introduction is also the book in which Yeivin chose a name for a class of manuscripts that do not keep to standard Tiberian pointing. The term “Palestino-Tiberian” has been widely accepted for a non-standard system associated with some European and other manuscripts, including Codex Reuchlinianus. Yeivin, in the Introduction and in a later Hebrew article of 1983, preferred the term “Extended Tiberian,” on the ground that the vocalisation in many of the manuscripts extends some of the principles of the standard Tiberian system, such as the use of the dagesh, rafe and hatef signs.²⁶ The 1983 article, “Mashma’ut Siman ha-Dagesh ba-Niqqud ha-Tavrani ha-Murhav,” published in the volume of Hebrew language studies presented to Zeev Ben-Hayyim, takes up the meaning of the dagesh sign in that extended pointing.²⁷ A difference of name is not a small matter in this field. It decides whether a manuscript is being described as a mixture of two local traditions, or as a development of the Tiberian system itself. Yeivin, characteristically, chose the description that starts from the signs and from the principles they extend.

The Babylonian Tradition as a Language

The second great field of Yeivin’s research was the Babylonian system of vowel signs, in which the signs are placed above the letters, and which was used in the Jewish communities of Iraq before the Tiberian system displaced it. Most of the evidence for it survives in fragments from the Cairo Genizah, scattered among libraries in Cambridge, St Petersburg, New York and elsewhere, and much of the modern work on those fragments was first done from photographs and from film. Kahle’s early twentieth-century publications had brought the fragments to scholarly attention. Yeivin’s principal publication in this field, Masoret ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit ha-Mishtaqefet ba-Niqqud ha-Bavli, “The Hebrew Language Tradition as Reflected in the Babylonian Vocalization,” appeared in 1985.²⁸ As its title indicates, its subject is the language tradition that the signs record, as well as the signs themselves.

Khan’s judgment on the book is unambiguous.

The Babylonian tradition has been exhaustively described by Yeivin (1985), which is the most authoritative scholarly source.

Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, vol. 1, pp. 13–14

He adds that important earlier studies of manuscripts with Babylonian vocalisation were made by Kahle, and he points to later overviews, including his own, for the distinctive features of the system and of the reading traditions it reflects.²⁹ The journal essay on Babylonian vocalisation sets out that system for a different purpose. What matters here is the kind of authority Khan is ascribing to Yeivin: not a first sketch, and not a popular summary, but the description from which later work on particular signs, particular manuscripts and particular comparisons with Tiberian Hebrew now starts.

The consequences of that description appear wherever a later writer has to explain why the Babylonian evidence is fragmentary, and what happened to the tradition it records. Phillips, introducing his report on EVR II B 80+, notes that the rapid triumph of the Tiberian biblical text and reading tradition among the various Jewish communities quickly led to the demise and obscuring of the once-influential Babylonian text and reading tradition, and of the Babylonian Masorah with it, citing Yeivin, at pages 22–24 of the 1985 work, for that historical outline. The study of the Babylonian Masorah, he adds, is still a work in progress. Over the last century many individual fragments have been identified, and small portions of the Babylonian Masorah of the Prophets have been edited, including portions edited by Gérard Weil in 1963 and by Yeivin in 1982, but compared with the Babylonian Masorah of the Pentateuch the remains are few.³⁰ Yeivin’s 1985 volumes, on this account, sit in the middle of a longer labour: after Kahle’s first publications, before Ofer’s fuller treatment of the Pentateuch notes, and alongside Yeivin’s own smaller editions and articles, including work of 1966 and 1973 that Phillips cites, with Kahle, on Babylonian masoretic terms.³¹

Because the 1985 book describes a language tradition and not only a notation, later work on pronunciation can use it as a grammar. Khan does so repeatedly, for the behaviour of particular vowels, for the treatment of mappiq and dagesh, and for comparisons between older and middle forms of the Babylonian dialect. Those citations are too numerous, and too technical, to be repeated here as a chain of examples. Their mere density is part of the point. A later standard work on the Tiberian pronunciation tradition cannot describe the Babylonian system, or use it as a control, without going through Yeivin, often paragraph by paragraph. That is what “the most authoritative scholarly source” means in practice.

The same volumes also help to explain a feature of the early Tiberian manuscripts already mentioned: that their notes, and sometimes their signs, are not sealed off from the East. Once the Babylonian tradition has been described as a whole, a Babylonian term or a Babylonian vowel sign in a Tiberian margin can be recognised for what it is, even if, as in the Aleppo Codex, the dependence of the manuscript on the Babylonian Masorah remains a matter of careful disagreement. Yeivin’s two great fields of research were not, on this evidence, separate careers. The book that described the pointing of the Aleppo Codex and the book that described the Babylonian language tradition are complementary accounts of the same historical situation, in which one tradition became standard and the other became a source of scattered signs, terms and comparisons.

A Later Hebrew Handbook and the Smaller Studies

In 2003 the Academy of the Hebrew Language published Yeivin’s Ha-Masorah la-Miqra, “The Biblical Masorah.”³² Its subject, as the title indicates, is the field of the English introduction, and it represents the state of his work on the Masoretic notes more than two decades after the 1980 volume. Because it is written in Hebrew, it is cited less often in English-language scholarship than the earlier book, but it is not unused. Beiler turns to it, at pages 13–19, for vocalisation differences in the Cairo Codex, when he is comparing that manuscript’s paratextual features with those of other early books.³³ Phillips, as already noted, uses pages 93–95 for a list of Babylonian masoretic terms, a list that later work has expanded.³⁴ The existence of two handbooks from different stages of one career illustrates a recurring problem in the study of the Masorah. The notes of the medieval codices were never standardised, and each scribe selected and arranged them for his own manuscript, as Phillips has shown in the case of Samuel ben Jacob.³⁵ Any handbook must therefore generalise from a few model codices, and its descriptions can be refined as further manuscripts are examined. Yeivin’s two books stand at successive points in that process.

Around the handbooks there is a scatter of shorter studies that later writers still have occasion to cite, and that show the range of the same research programme. The 1983 article on the dagesh in the extended Tiberian pointing has already been mentioned. An earlier article of 1962 is cited by Khan for a precise observation about the Aleppo Codex: in certain cases where the qere is intended to correct the spelling of the ketiv, the vocalisation signs in that manuscript are not marked in the order required by the qere, but are marked on the letters of the ketiv in a different order from the form of the qere they are intended to represent. Each individual letter has the vocalisation required by the qere, but the sequence of vowels still follows the order of the letters in the ketiv.³⁶ The observation is typical of Yeivin at the scale of a single word, as the Aleppo study is typical of him at the scale of a whole manuscript, and the Introduction at the scale of a tradition.

Other shorter publications are visible mainly as entries in later bibliographies, and it would be wrong to pretend to a closer knowledge of them than those entries support. The bibliographies in the 2022 volume of studies in the Masoretic tradition include a 1959 article on the accentuation of rabbinic texts, a 1963 article on a Palestinian fragment of haftarot, and the 1966 article on two terms of the Babylonian Masorah already mentioned. Yeivin also appears as a co-editor, with Nehemia Allony, of a Masoretic treatise published in 1985, which Khan cites for particular forms in that treatise.³⁷ In 1990 he published volume 2 of Ohel Hayim, a catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts of the Manfred and Anne Lehmann family, devoted to biblical manuscripts. Library records describe a book of some xiv, 440 and 29 pages, in English and Hebrew, issued in New York by the Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation, and classified as a catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament.³⁸ The catalogue is a different kind of book from the Aleppo study or the Introduction, but it belongs to the same career: the description, item by item, of biblical manuscripts, so that later work can find them and compare them.

After the Handbooks

A handbook is a success when later scholars can work with it, argue with it, and still not be able to do without it. That is the position Yeivin’s books now occupy. Khan’s study of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition, the most substantial recent account of the sounds that the Tiberian signs record, treats the 1985 Babylonian volumes as the authoritative description of the sister tradition, uses the 1968 Aleppo study as a standard source for the relations among the early Tiberian manuscripts, and uses the 1980 Introduction for manuscript lists, abbreviations, qere and ketiv, and a preferred name for the extended Tiberian pointing. Phillips’s recovery of L17 as a book of Samuel ben Jacob begins from Yeivin’s label and from Yeivin’s judgment that the manuscript stands close to the Aleppo Codex, a judgment formed when the book was still, for most readers, a set of microfilms in Jerusalem. Beiler’s enquiry into a single marginal sign still starts from a page of the Introduction, including a judgment that later finds have only partly qualified, and from Yeivin’s refusal of an “astonishing” expansion of a final nun.

The same later work also shows, honestly, where a handbook cannot have the last word. Ofer’s list of Babylonian terms in the Tiberian Masorah is longer than Yeivin’s. Ofer is more willing than Yeivin was to consider a Babylonian source for one note in the Aleppo Codex, and still will not call the case certain. Phillips has shown that Samuel ben Jacob could reproduce a Masorah magna identically in more than one manuscript, contrary to the ordinary variety of Tiberian notes, a habit that any general description of the Masorah has to take into account. Beiler can record later examples of a sign that Yeivin had seen fall out of general use after the twelfth century. None of these refinements abolishes the books they refine. They are what a manuscript-based description looks like once other manuscripts, and other readers, have been brought into the same room.

Yeivin did not leave a long autobiographical record, and this essay has not tried to invent one. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Israel Academy are enough to place him in Jerusalem, in the Hebrew University, in the historical dictionary, in the Bible Project, and among the members of the Academy, and to date his birth, his prize, his election and his death. The rest of the record is the books. They remain the working descriptions of the pointed text from which a later generation continues to start, whether the task is to read a sign in the margin of the Aleppo Codex, to place a Former Prophets manuscript in relation to it, to describe a Babylonian vowel, or to teach a student how the Masorah speaks. That, rather than a longer biography, is the measure of the career.

Notes

1. “Yeivin, Israel,” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, at Encyclopedia.com. *
2. “Israel Yeivin,” Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, fellows 1987–1988, at iias.huji.ac.il. *
3. “Prof. Israel Yeivin,” Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, deceased members, at academy.ac.il. *
4. Israel Yeivin, The Aleppo Codex of the Bible: A Study of its Vocalization and Accentuation (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1968), at archive.org; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Yeivin, Israel”. *
5. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), 28–29. *
6. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 29–30. *
7. Geoffrey Khan, “Hebrew Vocalisation Signs in Karaite Transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic Script,” in Daniel J. Crowther, Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan, eds., Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), 203–241, at doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0330, 238–39. *
8. Kim Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex: L17,” Tyndale Bulletin 68.1 (2017), 1–29, at tyndalebulletin.org, 1–2. *
9. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 4. *
10. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 4–5. *
11. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 6–7. *
12. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 6–7. *
13. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 18. *
14. Kim Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+: An Initial Report,” in Daniel J. Crowther, Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan, eds., Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), 23–73, at doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0330, 25–26. *
15. Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+”, 49–50. *
16. Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+”, 46–51. *
17. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, translated and edited by E. J. Revell, Masoretic Studies 5 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1980). *
18. Phillips, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex”, 3. *
19. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 22–23. *
20. Vincent D. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin: Meaning, Purpose, Localisation,” in Daniel J. Crowther, Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan, eds., Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), 75–113, at doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0330, 75. *
21. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin”, 76–77, 95. *
22. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin”, 90. *
23. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin”, 77. *
24. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 24–25. *
25. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 163–64. *
26. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 131–32. *
27. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 131–32. *
28. Israel Yeivin, Masoret ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit ha-Mishtaqefet ba-Niqqud ha-Bavli (Jerusalem, 1985); Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Yeivin, Israel”. *
29. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 13–14. *
30. Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+”, 25–26. *
31. Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+”, 46. *
32. Israel Yeivin, Ha-Masorah la-Miqra [The Biblical Masorah] (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2003); Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Yeivin, Israel”. *
33. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin”, 104. *
34. Phillips, “The Masoretic Notes in RNL EVR II B 80+”, 46–51. *
35. Kim Phillips, “The Masora Magna of Two Biblical Fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and the Unusual Practice of the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex,” Tyndale Bulletin 67.2 (2016), 287–307, at tyndalebulletin.org. *
36. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1, 24. *
37. Khan, Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition, vol. 1. *
38. Israel Yeivin, Ohel Hayim: A Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts of the Manfred and Anne Lehmann Family, vol. 2, Biblical Manuscripts (New York: Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation, 1990), at archive.org. *