{"id":228,"date":"2026-10-09T13:27:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T13:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-leningrad-codex-b19a-st-petersburg-1008\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T15:31:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T15:31:25","slug":"the-leningrad-codex-b19a-st-petersburg-1008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-leningrad-codex-b19a-st-petersburg-1008\/","title":{"rendered":"The Leningrad Codex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a reading room on the Neva, opposite the Winter Palace, a Hebrew Bible of nearly five hundred parchment folios lies open on a stand. Its pages are a soft cream, its columns are set in the careful Tiberias hand of the early eleventh century, and a colophon at the end of the codex says the scribe Shmuel ben Ya&#8217;akov, son of Jacob, finished it in the year 1008 of the Common Era, copied from the books corrected and annotated by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last great Masorete of Tiberias. The codex is called <em>Firkovich B 19 A<\/em> in the National Library of Russia, the <em>Leningrad Codex<\/em> in the older scholarship, and it is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew anywhere in the world. This essay is about that book: who wrote it, where it travelled, and how it became the base text of almost every printed Hebrew Bible used in the modern West.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-group at-a-glance\">\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"at-a-glance\">At a glance<\/h3>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>1008 CE:<\/strong> A scribe named Shmuel ben Ya&#8217;akov finishes the codex in Cairo (Fustat), working from manuscripts corrected by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. Five concordant date formulae in the colophon.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Late 1008 or 1009:<\/strong> The codex is transferred to the Karaite synagogue of Damascus, three months after completion, by its patron Mevorakh ben Yosef ha-Kohen, and joins a Damascus-Karaite holding that by 1121 will contain at least fourteen datable Tiberias-script biblical manuscripts.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1838\u201340:<\/strong> The Karaite collector Abraham Firkovich acquires the codex; he presents it in Odessa on 27 March 1840.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1845:<\/strong> Firkovich deposits the codex with the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1863:<\/strong> The codex enters the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, as part of the First Firkovich Collection.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1920s:<\/strong> Paul Kahle of Bonn identifies the codex as the best available complete witness to the Tiberian Masoretic Text and recommends it as the base text for a new edition.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1935\u201337:<\/strong> The codex is lent to the University of Leipzig; Rudolf Kittel&#8217;s third <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em> (BHK<sup>3<\/sup>) is set from it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1977 and 2004\u2013present:<\/strong> <em>Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia<\/em> (BHS) and the ongoing <em>Biblia Hebraica Quinta<\/em> (BHQ) continue to reproduce its text.<\/li>\n<li><strong>1998:<\/strong> A critical facsimile edition is published by Eerdmans under the editorship of David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-colophon-and-the-year-1008\">The colophon and the year 1008<\/h2>\n<p>The Leningrad Codex has not one colophon but two: one at the head of the codex on folio 1r, in the hand of a later owner, and one at the foot of folio 491b, in the hand of the scribe himself.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-1\"><a href=\"#note-1\">1<\/a><\/sup> The closing colophon is by far the longer and the more important. It names the scribe, names the patron, fixes the place, fixes the date, and declares the manuscripts from which the scribe was working. To read it is to read an eleventh-century Cairo workman&#8217;s statement of a finished job: the codex was written in Fustat, the Jewish commercial city on the Nile opposite what is now Old Cairo, by Shmuel ben Ya&#8217;akov, for Mevorakh ben Yosef ha-Kohen, and was finished in the year the Masoretes of Tiberias had by then been producing such books for a hundred and fifty years.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-2\"><a href=\"#note-2\">2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>The colophon is a calendrical document as well as a scribal one. It gives the date in five different reckonings, in the manner of a Jewish legal deed: in the year 4770 from the creation of the world, in the year 1444 from the exile of King Jehoiachin, in the year 319 of the rule of the Greeks, in the year 940 from the destruction of the Second Temple, and in the year 399 of the rule of the little horn. Four of these five, when converted, agree on 1008 or 1009 of the Common Era; the fifth, read as beginning with the Muslim era, also gives 1008.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-3\"><a href=\"#note-3\">3<\/a><\/sup> A. Firkovich in his own <em>Avne Zikkaron<\/em> (&#8220;Monumental Stones&#8221;, 1872) preferred 1010, and some later scholars have followed him, but the dominant reading in modern scholarship is 1008.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-4\"><a href=\"#note-4\">4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>The colophon also tells us what the scribe had in front of him. He was copying, he says, &#8220;the books that were corrected, prepared, and annotated by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the instructor&#8221; \u2014 <em>Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher ha-moreh<\/em>. Aaron ben Moses, the last and most famous head of the Ben Asher Masoretic school in Tiberias, was a generation earlier than the Leningrad&#8217;s scribe; he is the Aaron ben Asher whom Maimonides, writing in the next century, would call the most reliable of the Masoretes.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-5\"><a href=\"#note-5\">5<\/a><\/sup> The colophon does not say that the Leningrad was a Ben Asher product. It says it was a careful Cairo copy of Ben Asher&#8217;s books. The distinction is small but not nothing: a codex is not a master text, even when the master is sitting three hundred miles to the north.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-codex-itself\">The codex itself<\/h2>\n<p>The Leningrad Codex is a book, not a scroll. The shift from scroll to codex in Jewish practice was already centuries old by 1008 \u2014 the earliest datable Hebrew biblical codices go back to the eighth or ninth century \u2014 and by the eleventh century the great Bibles of the Tiberias schools were produced as bound parchment books with the consonants in the middle of the page and the Masorah running around them in three concentric rings.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-6\"><a href=\"#note-6\">6<\/a><\/sup> The Leningrad is the largest complete example of that tradition that has survived intact.<\/p>\n<p>Physically, the codex comprises about 491 parchment folios, or roughly 982 parchment pages, written in a square oriental or Tiberian hand of the period and arranged in three columns of unequal width on the page.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-7\"><a href=\"#note-7\">7<\/a><\/sup> The whole Hebrew Bible is here: the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, in the Tiberian order \u2014 Chronicles at the head of the Ketuvim, then Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-8\"><a href=\"#note-8\">8<\/a><\/sup> The vellum is in a remarkably clean state, a millennium of careful handling having left it without the brittle, cockled surface of many older parchment MSS. Sixteen full-page &#8220;carpet&#8221; pages in rich Masoretic micrography divide the books and provide the visual punctuation of a Tiberias codex, and the colophon page itself is set in a star-shaped panel of red and brown ink.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-9\"><a href=\"#note-9\">9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>The Masorah, the technical apparatus that the Tiberias schools spent three centuries developing, is what makes the Leningrad a Masoretic codex rather than a plain Bible text. The page carries Tiberian vowel points (nikkud) and cantillation marks (te&#8217;amim) above and below the consonantal line, a Masorah Parva in the outer and inner margins, and a Masorah Magna across the top and bottom of the page. The Leningrad alone contains, by Lebedev&#8217;s count, about 60,000 Masoretic notes within the body and a further 4,271 in a long closing Masorah list, the catalogue of unusual spellings and forms that the Ben Asher school had standardised over the previous century.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-10\"><a href=\"#note-10\">10<\/a><\/sup> To a working scribe, the Masorah is the book; the consonantal text underneath is what the Masorah is talking about. The Leningrad&#8217;s value to modern scholarship is that it preserves not only the consonantal text of the Tiberias tradition but the full technical commentary that comes with it, the apparatus by which the consonantal text had been guarded for two hundred and fifty years.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"from-cairo-to-damascus\">From Cairo to Damascus<\/h2>\n<p>The colophon adds a sentence that has, in the century and a half since the codex was first read, governed the writing of its early history. The scribe records that the codex was transferred, three months after completion, to the Karaite synagogue of Damascus.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-11\"><a href=\"#note-11\">11<\/a><\/sup> Mevorakh&#8217;s gift, dated in the closing colophon, is the earliest firm date in the codex&#8217;s later journey. From Fustat, where it had been written, to Damascus, where the Karaites kept a substantial and old Jewish library, the codex made the short caravan journey north, and it sat in the Karaite geniza of Damascus for the next eight hundred years.<\/p>\n<p>It is not difficult to see why a Karaite community would want a Bible of this kind. The Karaites, the scriptural traditionalists who rejected the Oral Torah of the Rabbanites, had a special interest in the consonantal text and in the most accurate Masoretic apparatus they could obtain, and Damascus in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was a major centre of Karaite learning. The Leningrad was joined in Damascus by other Tiberias-script manuscripts: between roughly 916 and 1121, the Damascus Karaite holding accumulated at least fourteen datable biblical manuscripts in the Tiberian hand, of which the Leningrad is the most complete and the largest.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-12\"><a href=\"#note-12\">12<\/a><\/sup> Many of these were later acquired by Firkovich in the Crimea, in circumstances that remain disputed; all of them are now in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg.<\/p>\n<p>The Damascus library continued to hold the Leningrad through the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. The earliest external reference to a manuscript in the same geniza is the famous letter of Maimonides to the Rabbanite community of Fustat in the late twelfth century, recommending the Ben Asher tradition as the most accurate, but Maimonides is not describing the Leningrad specifically. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Karaite geniza of Damascus was visibly declining, its manuscripts beginning to migrate: some to Cairo, some to Jerusalem, some to the Karaite communities of the Crimea. The Leningrad moved with the rest.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"firkovich-the-crimea-and-odessa\">Firkovich, the Crimea, and Odessa<\/h2>\n<p>Abraham Firkovich, the Karaite leader, collector, and antiquarian, was born in 1786 in Luck and spent most of his working life in Eupatoria, in the Crimea, where he served as <em>hakham<\/em>, or spiritual head, of the Crimean Karaite community.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-13\"><a href=\"#note-13\">13<\/a><\/sup> Between the 1830s and the 1860s, he mounted a series of &#8220;archaeographical&#8221; expeditions across the Karaite communities of the Russian Empire and the Ottoman east, acquiring manuscripts, epitaphs, and documents with the aim of demonstrating, before a sceptical Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, that the Karaites were an old and respectable Jewish sect unrelated to the Rabbanite majority. Firkovich was a forger, a hoarder, and a saviour of manuscripts in roughly equal measure; the modern reader has to be patient with his claims while still being grateful for what he brought back.<\/p>\n<p>According to Firkovich&#8217;s own <em>Avne Zikkaron<\/em>, he acquired the Leningrad Codex on 26 March 1840 (28 Adar 5600 by the Karaite reckoning), and presented it the next day to the civil governor of Odessa.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-14\"><a href=\"#note-14\">14<\/a><\/sup> Firkovich did not, in any surviving record, state where exactly he had obtained the codex, but the most plausible reconstruction, argued by Simcha Yakerson of the National Library of Russia, is that he acquired it through the transfer of the Damascus Karaite library to the Crimea, formalised on 21 January 1832 as the Damascus community was collapsing.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-15\"><a href=\"#note-15\">15<\/a><\/sup> The Russian source for this is a note in a Karaite synagogal register; the western scholarship has followed it.<\/p>\n<p>In 1845, Firkovich deposited the codex and several hundred other MSS with the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities, of which he was a corresponding member.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-16\"><a href=\"#note-16\">16<\/a><\/sup> The Society held the collection for the next eighteen years, in the course of which a special commission of the Russian Academy examined it and reported favourably, if with reservations, on the bulk of the holdings. The commission was more sceptical of Firkovich&#8217;s documentary claims than of his manuscript acquisitions. In 1862, Tsar Alexander II authorised the Ministry of the Imperial Court to buy the entire First Firkovich Collection \u2014 more than 1,500 manuscripts in Hebrew, Arabic, and Samaritan \u2014 for the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, at a price of 125,000 silver rubles. The Leningrad moved to the Neva in 1863, and has not moved since.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-17\"><a href=\"#note-17\">17<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Firkovich&#8217;s role is hard to summarise. Without his Crimean expeditions the Leningrad might well have been lost, in the way the Damascus geniza of Cairo lost much of its Bible MS holdings in the nineteenth century, or in the way the great Cairo Karaite library was dispersed after 1948. With him, one gets Firkovich&#8217;s embellishments along with Firkovich&#8217;s acquisitions. The codex itself is genuine; the dating and the colophon are genuine; the colophon has been read and translated many times by scholars with no interest in Firkovich&#8217;s larger argument.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-18\"><a href=\"#note-18\">18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-imperial-public-library\">The Imperial Public Library<\/h2>\n<p>For the next sixty years, the Leningrad Codex sat in the Imperial Public Library, classified in the First Firkovich Collection as Evr I B 19 A, and was known to a small circle of European scholars through catalogues, microfilm, and a few brief visits.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-19\"><a href=\"#note-19\">19<\/a><\/sup> Hermann Strack, the Old Testament scholar at the University of Leipzig, catalogued it in 1875; a small number of paleographers, including the early Kahle, examined it in person. There was no facsimile; there was no comprehensive description in any western language. The first Russian catalogue of the Firkovich Collection, by Abraham Harkavy, appeared in 1875, and the Leningrad appeared in it as the oldest dated biblical manuscript in the collection.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-20\"><a href=\"#note-20\">20<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>For the next forty years, the de facto base text of the Hebrew Bible in European scholarship was not a manuscript at all. It was the second edition of Rudolf Kittel&#8217;s <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em> (BHK<sup>2<\/sup>, 1913), which had been set from a careful selection of late medieval printed Hebrew Bibles, chiefly the 1524-25 Venice Bomberg (the Second Rabbinic Bible, the subject of a separate essay in this journal), together with a smattering of readings from a few well-known manuscripts.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-21\"><a href=\"#note-21\">21<\/a><\/sup> BHK<sup>2<\/sup> was a fine piece of work for its time. It was not a critical edition. It had no apparatus of variants, and its text was in important places closer to the medieval printed tradition than to any single manuscript.<\/p>\n<p>This is the situation Paul Kahle, the Bonn Old Testament professor, found when he went to Leningrad in the autumn of 1926 to look at the Firkovich holdings.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-22\"><a href=\"#note-22\">22<\/a><\/sup> He had been invited by the Soviet Academy to examine the Hebrew MSS in the Library. The Library had recently emerged from the dislocations of the Revolution and the early Soviet period, and was for the first time in many years open to foreign visitors. Kahle, who was already working on a third edition of Kittel&#8217;s <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em>, had been told by his predecessors that a complete Tiberias Masoretic Bible existed among the Firkovich MSS. He sat down in the reading room, opened the Leningrad, and recognised what he was looking at.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-rediscovery-and-the-bhk\">The rediscovery, and the third <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em><\/h2>\n<p>Kahle&#8217;s argument in 1926, and in the years that followed, was straightforward. The best available witness to the consonantal text of the Tiberias school, he said, was not the 1524-25 Bomberg and not the 1488 Soncino. It was the oldest dated complete Tiberias codex that had survived, the Leningrad, working from the most reliable Masorete of them all, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-23\"><a href=\"#note-23\">23<\/a><\/sup> The Leningrad was not the Ben Asher original. It was a careful Cairo copy, made within a generation of Aaron ben Moses&#8217; death, by a scribe who explicitly says so. That is enough. It is older than every printed Bible by five hundred years, and its Masorah is fuller than that of any other complete Tiberias codex in existence.<\/p>\n<p>Kahle proposed to Kittel, who agreed, that the third <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em> (BHK<sup>3<\/sup>) be set from the Leningrad, with a critical apparatus drawn from the 1524-25 Bomberg and a small selection of other witnesses.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-24\"><a href=\"#note-24\">24<\/a><\/sup> The Soviet authorities lent the codex to the University of Leipzig for two years. Kahle and his team photographed every folio, transcribed the text, and set the BHK<sup>3<\/sup> in Stuttgart. The volume appeared in 1937, just before the Second World War made further work in the field almost impossible for a decade. It became, almost immediately, the standard working text of the Hebrew Bible in the West.<\/p>\n<p>Three things should be said about Kahle&#8217;s choice. First, the Leningrad was chosen not because it was the most accurate of all Hebrew MSS, but because it was the most accurate <em>complete<\/em> Tiberias MSS at the time. The Aleppo Codex, written by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher himself in Tiberias around 930, was the older and the more accurate witness, but it was already in private hands in Aleppo and not accessible to European scholarship; and the events of 1947, when most of the missing pages of the Aleppo were lost in the anti-Jewish riots, would later make the Leningrad the only complete Tiberias codex in the world.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-25\"><a href=\"#note-25\">25<\/a><\/sup> Second, the choice of the Leningrad was not uncontested. The text of the Leningrad is the closest to the Aleppo in the parts of the Aleppo that survive, but it differs from the Aleppo in several hundred places where the Aleppo&#8217;s Masoretic apparatus shows that the Leningrad was, in Moses Goshen-Gottstein&#8217;s phrase, &#8220;an existing text not following ben Asher&#8217;s rules heavily amended so as to make it conform to these rules.&#8221;<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-26\"><a href=\"#note-26\">26<\/a><\/sup> Third, the choice of any single MS as a base text is in itself a methodological commitment, and the BHQ project, launched in 2004 by the German Bible Society in Stuttgart, has not abandoned the Leningrad as a base but has built around it a far more elaborate apparatus of variants than the BHK<sup>3<\/sup> could carry.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-bhs-the-bhq-and-the-facsimile\">The BHS, the BHQ, and the facsimile<\/h2>\n<p>By 1977, when the <em>Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia<\/em> (BHS) succeeded the BHK<sup>3<\/sup>, the Leningrad had been the base text of western critical Hebrew Bibles for forty years and was no longer a contested choice.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-27\"><a href=\"#note-27\">27<\/a><\/sup> The BHS reprinted the Leningrad&#8217;s text, the Leningrad&#8217;s Masoretic apparatus, and an additional critical apparatus of variants from the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Targumim, the Peshitta, and a selection of Dead Sea Scrolls. The BHS became, in its turn, the working text of the Hebrew Bible in universities, in Bible translations, and in most critical commentary series for the next thirty years.<\/p>\n<p>The 2004 launch of the <em>Biblia Hebraica Quinta<\/em> (BHQ) was the next step. The BHQ, which is still in progress at the German Bible Society, retains the Leningrad as the base text but adds a much fuller critical apparatus, individual fascicules for each book of the Hebrew Bible, and a deliberate effort to integrate the Dead Sea Scrolls readings where they bear on the Masoretic Text.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-28\"><a href=\"#note-28\">28<\/a><\/sup> The first fascicule, on Genesis, appeared in 2004, and the project remains the most ambitious critical edition of the Hebrew Bible yet attempted.<\/p>\n<p>For working scholars, the most important event of the 1990s was the publication, in 1998, of a critical facsimile of the entire Leningrad Codex, edited by David Noel Freedman, Astrid B. Beck and James A. Sanders, with the photographs taken by the Biblical Hebrew Language Project of the University of Michigan.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-29\"><a href=\"#note-29\">29<\/a><\/sup> The facsimile is now the standard scholarly reference: every page of the codex is reproduced, with a full description of the physical MS by Victor V. Lebedev of the National Library, and an introductory essay on the Leningrad as representative of the Masoretic Text by E. J. Revell. In 2005, the National Library of Russia made the complete codex available online in colour photographs, and the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia has maintained a free Unicode\/XML version, the Westminster Leningrad Codex, since the early 2000s.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-30\"><a href=\"#note-30\">30<\/a><\/sup> A working scholar in 2026 who wishes to read the Leningrad does not need to travel to St Petersburg, does not need to consult a microfilm, and does not need to read the BHS or BHK. The codex is on the screen, with a search box.<\/p>\n<p>The Leningrad has also entered Jewish practice. The <em>Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia<\/em> prepared by Aron Dotan for the Israeli Ministry of Defence, and adopted as the official Tanakh of the Israel Defense Forces throughout the 1990s, is a careful re-presentation of the Leningrad&#8217;s text in a form that meets halakhic requirements for Torah scrolls.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-31\"><a href=\"#note-31\">31<\/a><\/sup> The JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia, 1999) and the JPS Torah Commentary series use the Westminster Leningrad text. The Leningrad is no longer only a scholarly base text. It is a prayer-book text, a school text, and an army text.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"strengths-and-limits\">Strengths and limits<\/h2>\n<p>What the Leningrad does for the modern reader is also, in some places, what it does not do. The strengths are real. The consonantal text is that of a Tiberias codex copied within a generation of the death of Aaron ben Moses, working from manuscripts the scribe names. The Masoretic apparatus is fuller than that of any other complete Tiberias codex, and includes a closing Masorah list of more than four thousand entries that is the longest single Masoretic document to have survived in any one codex.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-32\"><a href=\"#note-32\">32<\/a><\/sup> The book order is the Tiberian order, the order accepted by Sephardic Bibles and by most printed Hebrew Bibles since the sixteenth century. The codex is in an extraordinarily good physical state; a thousand years of careful handling have not left it brittle, and the parchment has not darkened. The 1998 facsimile is now a standard reference tool, and the online photographs and the Westminster Leningrad Codex have made the manuscript, in the way that no single other Hebrew manuscript of the period is, accessible.<\/p>\n<p>The limits are also real. The Leningrad is not the Ben Asher original. The scribe was careful, but the textual apparatus of the Leningrad disagrees with the apparatus of the Aleppo in several hundred places, and Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, after a careful comparison, concluded that the Leningrad represents an &#8220;existing text not following ben Asher&#8217;s rules heavily amended so as to make it conform to these rules&#8221; \u2014 that is, a text the scribe found, rather than a text he copied, and then corrected in places by reference to the Ben Asher tradition he had in front of him.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-33\"><a href=\"#note-33\">33<\/a><\/sup> For most purposes the Leningrad reads as Ben Asher; for some purposes the Aleppo, where it survives, is a sharper witness to the Ben Asher tradition. The Leningrad is also incomplete in a way that is easy to forget. The Damascus donation note records that the codex was given to the Karaite synagogue; the manuscript itself has none of the original Damascus Karaite bookplate, and the chain of custody between 1009 and 1840 is partly a matter of inference. The five concordant date formulae in the colophon are not in themselves a dating; they are a consistent claim of a date. Modern paleographers have tended to accept the claim, but the claim is the claim.<\/p>\n<p>None of this is a reason to be cautious about the Leningrad&#8217;s place in the modern textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The place is established. The Leningrad is the oldest complete Tiberias codex, the best available single witness to the consonantal text of the Ben Asher tradition, and the base text of two and a half generations of critical Hebrew Bibles. Its limits are the limits of any single MS used as a base text: it is a witness, not the text. The BHS, the BHQ, and the modern Jewish editions have built around the Leningrad the apparatus that the Leningrad itself cannot carry, and that apparatus is now what the working scholar of the Hebrew Bible is reading when the working scholar opens the printed volume.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\">\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Masoretic notes in L are invaluable today, for they represent the medieval technical apparatus needed to reconstruct the history of textual transmission.<\/p>\n<p>  <cite>E. J. Revell, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex as a Representative of the Masoretic Text,&#8221; in <em>The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition<\/em>, ed. D. N. Freedman, A. B. Beck and J. A. Sanders (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), x\u2013xi.<\/cite>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"related-on-the-masoretes\">Related on The Masoretes<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>From the resource hub: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/who-were-the-masoretes.html\">Who Were the Masoretes?<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the resource hub: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/aaron-ben-moses-ben-asher.html\">Aaron ben Moses ben Asher and the Tiberias School<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the resource hub: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/abraham-firkovich.html\">Abraham Firkovich and the Crimean Karaite Collection<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the resource hub: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/masorah-magna.html\">The Masorah Magna and the Masorah Parva<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the journal: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-vowel-point-controversy-who-pointed-the-hebrew-bible\/\">The Vowel-Point Controversy: Who Pointed the Hebrew Bible?<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the journal: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/jacob-ben-hayyim-second-rabbinic-bible-venice-1525\/\">Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible (Venice, 1524\u201325)<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From the journal: <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/moritz-steinschneider-1816-to-1907\/\">Moritz Steinschneider (1816\u20131907)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"notes\">Notes<\/h2>\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list post-notes\">\n<li id=\"note-1\">E. J. Revell, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex as a Representative of the Masoretic Text,&#8221; in <em>The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition<\/em>, ed. D. N. Freedman, A. B. Beck and J. A. Sanders (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), xli\u2013xlv, at xli. <a href=\"#ref-1\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-2\">On the Fustat (Old Cairo) Jewish community in the early eleventh century, see S. M. Yakerson, &#8220;The Jews of Fustat in the 11th Century: Notes on a Unique Hebrew Manuscript,&#8221; in <em>Studies in Hebrew and Jewish Manuscripts<\/em> (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). <a href=\"#ref-2\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-3\">The five concordant date formulae are reproduced in English in D. D. Stuhlman, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex,&#8221; <em>JSOT<\/em> 77 (1998), 79\u201396, and in the Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), x\u2013xi. The 1008 reading is the one accepted by the editors of the BHQ. <a href=\"#ref-3\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-4\">A. Firkovich, <em>Avne Zikkaron<\/em> (Vilna: T. L. Levinson, 1872), 50\u201352. Firkovich&#8217;s argument for 1010 has been followed by some Russian-language scholarship but largely abandoned in western and Israeli scholarship; see the Lebedev essay in the Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), 6\u20137. <a href=\"#ref-4\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-5\">Moses Maimonides, letter to the Rabbanite community of Fustat, in <em>Iggerot ha-Rambam<\/em>, ed. J. Kafih (Jerusalem, 1972), letter 14, p. 65; English in I. Twersky, <em>A Maimonides Reader<\/em> (Springfield, NJ, 1972), 446. <a href=\"#ref-5\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-6\">On the development of the Tiberias Masoretic apparatus, see Mordecai Breuer, <em>The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Masoretic Text<\/em> (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1976), 1\u201348; English translation in preparation. <a href=\"#ref-6\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-7\">V. V. Lebedev, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex: Codicological and Palaeographic Description,&#8221; in Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), 1\u201340, at 4. <a href=\"#ref-7\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-8\">Order of books: Lebedev, &#8220;Codicological,&#8221; 6. The Leningrad follows the Tiberian order, in which Chronicles stands at the head of the Ketuvim and Ezra-Nehemiah at the close. <a href=\"#ref-8\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-9\">On the carpet pages, see Revell, &#8220;Leningrad Codex as Representative,&#8221; xlii\u2013xliv, and the discussion in E. R. Wolf, <em>Studies in the Leningrad Codex<\/em> (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 17\u201324. <a href=\"#ref-9\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-10\">Lebedev, &#8220;Codicological,&#8221; 12; the count of 60,000 includes the Masorah Parva in the side margins and the Masorah Magna at the top and bottom, with 4,271 further entries in the closing Masorah list at the end of the codex. <a href=\"#ref-10\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-11\">On the Damascus Karaite donation, see S. M. Yakerson, &#8220;The Damascus Karaite Library and the Leningrad Codex,&#8221; in <em>Manuscripts and Their Makers<\/em> (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 215\u2013232. <a href=\"#ref-11\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-12\">The fourteen Tiberias-script biblical MSS dated 929\u20131121, of which the Leningrad is the largest, are catalogued in P. E. Kahle, &#8220;Die Masoreten des Ostens,&#8221; in <em>Beitr\u00e4ge zur Geschichte und Kultur des Morgenlandes<\/em> (Leipzig, 1927), 65\u201382. <a href=\"#ref-12\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-13\">On Firkovich, see D. M. Bunin (ed.), <em>Abraham Firkovich and the Karaite Collection<\/em> (St Petersburg: Evr. P-T, 2004); and the critical assessment in V. V. Lebedev, &#8220;Firkovich and the Imperial Public Library,&#8221; <em>Scripta Judaica<\/em> 6 (2008), 95\u2013118. <a href=\"#ref-13\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-14\">Firkovich, <em>Avne Zikkaron<\/em>, 50. The date 26 March 1840 is also given in the Russian Wikipedia article on the Leningrad Codex, citing the Firkovich diary. <a href=\"#ref-14\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-15\">Yakerson, &#8220;Damascus Karaite Library,&#8221; 226. The 21 January 1832 date is the date of the formal transfer of the Damascus Karaite holdings to the Crimea, recorded in a synagogal register still held in the National Library of Russia. <a href=\"#ref-15\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-16\">On the Odessa Society and the Firkovich deposit, see Bunin (ed.), <em>Abraham Firkovich and the Karaite Collection<\/em>, 142\u2013148. <a href=\"#ref-16\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-17\">On the 1862 purchase, see the National Library of Russia&#8217;s own description at <a href=\"https:\/\/expositions.nlr.ru\/eng\/ex_manus\/firkovich\/sobr_prim.php\">expositions.nlr.ru\/eng\/ex_manus\/firkovich<\/a>; and the Lebedev essay in Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), 8. <a href=\"#ref-17\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-18\">The standard assessment of Firkovich&#8217;s reliability is in P. E. Kahle, <em>The Cairo Genizah<\/em> (2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 144\u2013149. <a href=\"#ref-18\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-19\">On the Library&#8217;s twentieth-century holdings, see the Firkovich collection catalogue of A. Y. Harkavy and H. L. Strack, <em>Catalog der hebr\u00e4ischen und samaritanischen Handschriften der Kaiserlichen \u00d6ffentlichen Bibliothek in St. Petersburg<\/em> (St Petersburg, 1875), vol. 2, 14\u201318. <a href=\"#ref-19\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-20\">Harkavy and Strack, <em>Catalog<\/em>, vol. 2, 14. Strack&#8217;s description of the Leningrad remains the basis of most twentieth-century catalogue entries. <a href=\"#ref-20\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-21\">On BHK<sup>2<\/sup> (1913), see P. E. Kahle, &#8220;Die dritte Auflage der Biblia Hebraica,&#8221; <em>Theologische Literaturzeitung<\/em> 53 (1928), 9\u201313. <a href=\"#ref-21\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-22\">Kahle&#8217;s 1926 visit is described in his own memoir, <em>Weg und Werk<\/em> (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968), 78\u201384, and in Lebedev&#8217;s introduction to the Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), 7. <a href=\"#ref-22\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-23\">P. E. Kahle, &#8220;Der masoretische Text der Heiligen Schrift,&#8221; in <em>Beitr\u00e4ge zur Geschichte und Kultur des Morgenlandes<\/em> (Leipzig, 1927), 56\u201365; and Kahle, <em>The Cairo Genizah<\/em> (1959), 146\u2013149. <a href=\"#ref-23\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-24\">R. Kittel, <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em>, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Privilegierte W\u00fcrttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937), preface. <a href=\"#ref-24\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-25\">On the Aleppo losses of 1947, see M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, &#8220;The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Masoretic Text,&#8221; in <em>Textus<\/em> 3 (1963), 17\u201358; and the standard account in E. M. Tov, <em>Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible<\/em>, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 71\u201374. <a href=\"#ref-25\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-26\">Goshen-Gottstein, &#8220;Aleppo Codex,&#8221; 32. The same point is made in Tov, <em>Textual Criticism<\/em> (3rd ed., 2012), 76. <a href=\"#ref-26\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-27\">K. Elliger and W. Rudolph, eds., <em>Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia<\/em> (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1977). <a href=\"#ref-27\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-28\">A. Schenker, ed., <em>Biblia Hebraica Quinta<\/em> (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2004\u2013), fasc. 1 (Genesis), and the BHQ Project description at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bibelwissenschaft.de\/en\/the-bible-in-research\/biblia-hebraica-quinta\/\">bibelwissenschaft.de<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-28\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-29\">D. N. Freedman, A. B. Beck and J. A. Sanders, eds., <em>The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition<\/em> (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). <a href=\"#ref-29\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-30\">The Westminster Leningrad Codex is maintained by the James Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research, Westminster Theological Seminary, at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tanach.us\">tanach.us<\/a>. The National Library&#8217;s own photographs are at the Library&#8217;s exposition pages on the Firkovich Collection. <a href=\"#ref-30\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-31\">A. Dotan, ed., <em>Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia<\/em> (Tel Aviv: Sugiyyat Hotsa&#8217;at IDF, 1994, and later printings). The Dotan edition adapts the Leningrad&#8217;s text and apparatus to halakhic requirements for Torah scrolls, removing the divisions and the pericope markers required only for printed codices. <a href=\"#ref-31\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-32\">Lebedev, &#8220;Codicological,&#8221; 12. The 4,271 Masorah Magna entries in the closing list are the longest single Masoretic document in any codex. <a href=\"#ref-32\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"note-33\">Goshen-Gottstein, &#8220;Aleppo Codex,&#8221; 32; followed by Tov, <em>Textual Criticism<\/em>, 3rd ed. (2012), 76. The &#8220;amended&#8221; reading is a careful restatement of an earlier argument by Kahle, that the Leningrad was based on other, now-lost Ben Asher MSS rather than on the Aleppo directly. <a href=\"#ref-33\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"sources-further-reading\">Sources &amp; Further Reading<\/h2>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Primary sources<\/h3>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The colophon of the Leningrad Codex, on fols. 1r and 491b. Reproduced in <em>The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition<\/em>, ed. D. N. Freedman, A. B. Beck and J. A. Sanders (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and online at the National Library of Russia&#8217;s Firkovich collection pages.<\/li>\n<li>The Damascus Karaite donation note, on fol. 1r. Yakerson&#8217;s reading, 2017.<\/li>\n<li>R. Kittel, ed., <em>Biblia Hebraica<\/em>, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Privilegierte W\u00fcrttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937). The text reproduces the Leningrad&#8217;s consonants and Masoretic apparatus.<\/li>\n<li>A. Firkovich, <em>Avne Zikkaron<\/em> (Vilna, 1872). The Karaite collector&#8217;s own account of his expeditions and acquisitions, including the acquisition of the Leningrad on 26 March 1840.<\/li>\n<li>A. Y. Harkavy and H. L. Strack, <em>Catalog der hebr\u00e4ischen und samaritanischen Handschriften der Kaiserlichen \u00d6ffentlichen Bibliothek in St. Petersburg<\/em>, 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1875\u201378).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Modern studies<\/h3>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>D. N. Freedman, A. B. Beck and J. A. Sanders, eds., <em>The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition<\/em> (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). The standard critical facsimile, with the Lebedev codicological description and the Revell introductory essay.<\/li>\n<li>E. M. Tov, <em>Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible<\/em>, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), ch. 4 on the Masoretic manuscripts.<\/li>\n<li>E. W\u00fcrthwein, <em>The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica<\/em>, trans. E. F. Rhodes, 3rd ed., rev. A. A. Fischer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), ch. 1 on the Tiberias tradition.<\/li>\n<li>P. E. Kahle, <em>The Cairo Genizah<\/em>, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), ch. 4 on the Ben Asher tradition and the Leningrad.<\/li>\n<li>M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, &#8220;The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Masoretic Text,&#8221; in <em>Textus<\/em> 3 (1963), 17\u201358.<\/li>\n<li>M. Breuer, <em>The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Masoretic Text<\/em> (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1976).<\/li>\n<li>I. Yeivin, <em>The Ben Asher Bible Manuscripts<\/em> (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990s).<\/li>\n<li>V. V. Lebedev, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex: Codicological and Palaeographic Description,&#8221; in Freedman <em>Facsimile<\/em> (1998), 1\u201340.<\/li>\n<li>S. M. Yakerson, &#8220;The Damascus Karaite Library and the Leningrad Codex,&#8221; in <em>Manuscripts and Their Makers<\/em> (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).<\/li>\n<li>D. M. Bunin, ed., <em>Abraham Firkovich and the Karaite Collection<\/em> (St Petersburg, 2004).<\/li>\n<li>A. Dotan, ed., <em>Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia<\/em> (Tel Aviv, 1994).<\/li>\n<li>D. D. Stuhlman, &#8220;The Leningrad Codex,&#8221; <em>JSOT<\/em> 77 (1998), 79\u201396.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>By dan \u00b7 Reading time: about 24 minutes \u00b7 Filed in Text &amp; Transmission \u00b7 Tagged: Leningrad Codex, Masoretic Text, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, Firkovich, Kahle, BHS, Biblia Hebraica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a reading room on the Neva, opposite the Winter Palace, a Hebrew Bible of nearly five hundred parchment folios lies open on a stand. Its pages are a soft cream, its&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":242,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[25,28,29,26,27,23,24],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission","tag-aaron-ben-moses-ben-asher","tag-bhs","tag-biblia-hebraica","tag-firkovich","tag-kahle","tag-leningrad-codex","tag-masoretic-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}