Misplaced Pages

#913086

120-647: The text has been recognized as the official Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) since 2001. Since its publication, it has been used to administer the oath of office to new presidents of the State of Israel . The text was edited according to the method of Mordechai Breuer under the supervision of Yosef Ofer, with additional proofreading and refinements since

240-801: A column has more than one such note. However these defects are considered microscopic in contrast to the overall high quality of this edition. The printed Jerusalem Crown puts the books of the Ketuvim in the accustomed printed sequence, rather than the sequence of the manuscript Aleppo Codex. The printed Jerusalem Crown has them in this order: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther Daniel Ezra, Nehemiah, and first and second Chronicles. The manuscript Aleppo Codex had them ordered: Chronicles, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, followed by (according to notes, because these are now lost) Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Bible The Bible

360-641: A combined linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible (the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the Samson story of Judges 16 and 1 Samuel) to having been composed in the premonarchial early Iron Age ( c.  1200 BCE ). The Dead Sea Scrolls , discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are

480-469: A place like Alexandria, Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria – which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world – were particularly scrupulous, even in these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings

600-585: A point of finding and collecting every known pre-1947 description of the Aleppo Codex (most of these were unpublished), including some surreptitious photographs, and used the descriptions of the surviving parts to verify the authenticity of the Codex and the descriptions of the missing parts to provide insights into the readings. To fill in remaining gaps he used the text of the Leningrad Codex , which

720-408: A profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of it through biblical criticism has indirectly impacted culture and history as well. The Bible is currently translated or is being translated into about half of the world's languages. Some view biblical texts to be morally problematic, historically inaccurate, or corrupted, although others find it

840-463: A single line and divided into two hemistichs (according to their poetic meter); this layout enables even readers unfamiliar with the biblical accentuation marks to read the text correctly. However, it also dictated a change in the typography of the pages compared with the rest of the Bible. The majority of the text, which is prose, is printed in three columns to the page. Psalms, Proverbs, and most of Job

960-467: A special two-column form emphasizing their internal parallelism, which was found early in the study of Hebrew poetry. "Stichs" are the lines that make up a verse "the parts of which lie parallel as to form and content". Collectively, these three books are known as Sifrei Emet (an acronym of the titles in Hebrew, איוב, משלי, תהלים yields Emet אמ"ת, which is also the Hebrew for "truth"). Hebrew cantillation

1080-453: A standard printed Hebrew Bible and take notes on the differences was Umberto Cassuto , who examined it in 1943. This secrecy made it impossible to confirm the authenticity of the Codex, and indeed Cassuto doubted that it was Maimonides' codex, though he agreed that it was tenth century. During the 1947 Anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo , the community's ancient synagogue was burned. Later, while

1200-536: A text trusted by all Jewish scholars. It is rumoured that in 1375 one of Maimonides' descendants brought it to Aleppo , Syria , leading to its present name. The Codex remained in Syria for nearly six hundred years. In 1947, rioters enraged by the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine burned down the synagogue where it was kept. The Codex disappeared, then reemerged in 1958, when it

1320-433: A useful historical source for certain people and events or a source of moral and ethical teachings. The Bible neither calls for nor condemns slavery outright, but there are verses that address dealing with it, and these verses have been used to support it, although the Bible has also been used to support abolitionism . Some have written that supersessionism begins in the book of Hebrews where others locate its beginnings in

SECTION 10

#1732779913914

1440-549: A variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds. British biblical scholar John K. Riches wrote: [T]he biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers – political, cultural, economic, and ecological – varied enormously. There are texts which reflect a nomadic existence, texts from people with an established monarchy and Temple cult, texts from exile, texts born out of fierce oppression by foreign rulers, courtly texts, texts from wandering charismatic preachers, texts from those who give themselves

1560-603: A variety of hypotheses regarding when and how the Torah was composed , but there is a general consensus that it took its final form during the reign of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (probably 450–350 BCE), or perhaps in the early Hellenistic period (333–164 BCE). The Hebrew names of the books are derived from the first words in the respective texts. The Torah consists of the following five books: The first eleven chapters of Genesis provide accounts of

1680-649: Is a collection of religious texts or scriptures which to a certain degree are held to be sacred in Christianity , Judaism , Samaritanism , Islam , the Baháʼí Faith , and other Abrahamic religions . The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally written in Hebrew , Aramaic , and Koine Greek . The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials that are accepted as part of

1800-672: Is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible . The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate , and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides . Together with the Leningrad Codex , it contains the Aaron ben Moses ben Asher Masoretic Text tradition. The codex was kept for five centuries in the Central Synagogue of Aleppo , until

1920-553: Is a modern version of the Tanakh based on the Aleppo Codex and the work of Breuer: It uses a newly designed typeface based on the calligraphy of the Codex and is based on its page layout. Among the Jewish community of Aleppo and their descendants in the post-1947 diaspora, the belief always was that the Codex holds great magical power and that the smallest piece of it can ensure the good health and well-being of its owner. Historically it

2040-460: Is also known as the "Five Books of Moses " or the Pentateuch , meaning "five scroll-cases". Traditionally these books were considered to have been dictated to Moses by God himself. Since the 17th century, scholars have viewed the original sources as being the product of multiple anonymous authors while also allowing the possibility that Moses first assembled the separate sources. There are

2160-416: Is any deviation between two texts. Textual critic Daniel B. Wallace explains that "Each deviation counts as one variant, regardless of how many MSS [manuscripts] attest to it." Hebrew scholar Emanuel Tov says the term is not evaluative; it is a recognition that the paths of development of different texts have separated. Medieval handwritten manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were considered extremely precise:

2280-604: Is defined by what we love". Natural law is in the Wisdom literature, the Prophets, Romans 1, Acts 17, and the book of Amos (Amos 1:3–2:5), where nations other than Israel are held accountable for their ethical decisions even though they don't know the Hebrew god. Political theorist Michael Walzer finds politics in the Hebrew Bible in covenant, law, and prophecy, which constitute an early form of almost democratic political ethics. Key elements in biblical criminal justice begin with

2400-500: Is derived from Koinē Greek : τὰ βιβλία , romanized:  ta biblia , meaning "the books" (singular βιβλίον , biblion ). The word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of " scroll " and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book". It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos , "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician seaport Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus

2520-520: Is no surprise that different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say, the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part "in-house" documents, copied from one another; they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics, which were not the same as those found in

SECTION 20

#1732779913914

2640-669: Is not until the Babylonian Talmud ( c.  550 BCE ) that a listing of the contents of these three divisions of scripture are found. The Tanakh was mainly written in Biblical Hebrew , with some small portions (Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26, Jeremiah 10:11, Daniel 2:4–7:28) written in Biblical Aramaic , a language which had become the lingua franca for much of the Semitic world. The Torah (תּוֹרָה)

2760-557: Is parchment, 33 cm high by 26.5 cm wide (13 inches × 10.43 inches). In particular, only the last few pages of the Torah are extant. The ink was made of three types of gall , ground and mixed with black soot and iron sulfate . The manuscript has been restored by specialists of the Israel Museum, whose director declared that, given the Codex's history, it is "in remarkably excellent condition". The purple markings on

2880-431: Is printed in two columns to the page. Chapter and verse numbers are added throughout, using Hebrew letters for the numerals. A new typeface, called Jerusalem Crown, was designed especially for this Bible by Zvi Narkiss . The typeface was modeled on the original lettering of the Aleppo Codex. Considerable thought went into the design of this clear, very legible lettering. Published in the spring of 2001 as an act in behalf

3000-459: Is short for biblia sacra "holy book". It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun ( biblia , gen. bibliae ) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. The Bible is not a single book; it is a collection of books whose complex development is not completely understood. The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation. Scholars of

3120-490: Is taken from the masoretic text (called the Leningrad Codex ) which dates from 1008. The Hebrew Bible can therefore sometimes be referred to as the Masoretic Text. The Hebrew Bible is also known by the name Tanakh ( Hebrew : תנ"ך ‎). This reflects the threefold division of the Hebrew scriptures, Torah ("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings") by using the first letters of each word. It

3240-676: Is the codex known in Egypt , which includes 24 books, which was in Jerusalem ," he wrote. David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra testifies to this being the same codex that was later transferred to Aleppo. The Codex, as it presents itself now in the Israel Museum where it is kept in a vault, consists of the 294 pages delivered by the Ben-Zvi Institute, plus one full page and a section of a second one recovered subsequently. The pages are preserved unbound and written on both sides. Each page

3360-525: Is the manner of chanting ritual readings as they are written and notated in the Masoretic Text of the Bible. Psalms, Job and Proverbs form a group with a "special system" of accenting used only in these three books. The five relatively short books of Song of Songs , Book of Ruth , the Book of Lamentations , Ecclesiastes , and Book of Esther are collectively known as the Hamesh Megillot . These are

3480-528: Is thought to have occurred before 68 during Nero's reign. Early Christians transported these writings around the Empire, translating them into Old Syriac , Coptic , Ethiopic , and Latin , and other languages. Bart Ehrman explains how these multiple texts later became grouped by scholars into categories: during the early centuries of the church, Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or taken to. Since texts were copied locally, it

3600-637: The Damascus Pentateuch in academic circles and as the "Damascus Keter", or "Crown of Damascus", in traditional Jewish circles. It was also written in Israel in the tenth century, and is now kept at the National Library of Israel as "ms. Heb 5702". It is available online here [1] . (This should not be confused with another Damascus Keter, of medieval Spanish origin.) The Aleppo Codex was the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down

3720-763: The Hebrew Bible : the Septuagint , the Masoretic Text , and the Samaritan Pentateuch (which contains only the first five books). They are related but do not share the same paths of development. The Septuagint, or the LXX, is a translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and some related texts, into Koine Greek, and is believed to have been carried out by approximately seventy or seventy-two scribes and elders who were Hellenic Jews , begun in Alexandria in

Jerusalem Crown - Misplaced Pages Continue

3840-590: The Israelites and other nations, and conflicts among Israelites, specifically, struggles between believers in "the L ORD God" ( Yahweh ) and believers in foreign gods, and the criticism of unethical and unjust behaviour of Israelite elites and rulers; in which prophets played a crucial and leading role. It ends with the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel by the Neo-Assyrian Empire , followed by

3960-618: The Mediterranean (fourth century to the founding of the Principate , 27  BCE ), the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (70 CE), and the extension of Roman rule to parts of Scotland (84 CE). The books of the Bible were initially written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls. No originals have survived. The age of the original composition of the texts is therefore difficult to determine and heavily debated. Using

4080-616: The Nevi'im ("prophets"), was canonized in the third century BCE. A third collection called the Ketuvim ("writings"), containing psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories, was canonized sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE. These three collections were written mostly in Biblical Hebrew , with some parts in Aramaic , which together form the Hebrew Bible or "TaNaKh" (an abbreviation of "Torah", "Nevi'im", and "Ketuvim"). There are three major historical versions of

4200-663: The Siege of Jerusalem (1099) during the First Crusade , the Crusaders held the codex and other holy works for ransom, along with Jewish survivors. The Aleppo Codex website cites two letters in the Cairo Geniza that describe how the inhabitants of Ashkelon borrowed money from Egypt to pay for the books. These Judeo-Arabic letters were discovered by noted Jewish historian Shelomo Dov Goitein in 1952. The Letter of

4320-411: The creation (or ordering) of the world and the history of God's early relationship with humanity. The remaining thirty-nine chapters of Genesis provide an account of God's covenant with the biblical patriarchs Abraham , Isaac and Jacob (also called Israel ) and Jacob's children, the " Children of Israel ", especially Joseph . It tells of how God commanded Abraham to leave his family and home in

4440-525: The 17th century; its oldest existing copies date to c. 1100 CE. Samaritans include only the Pentateuch (Torah) in their biblical canon. They do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakh's Book of Joshua exists, but Samaritans regard it as a non-canonical secular historical chronicle. In

4560-400: The 1850s, Shalom Shachne Yellin sent his son in law, Moses Joshua Kimchi, to Aleppo, to copy information about the Codex; Kimchi sat for weeks, and copied thousands of details about the codex into the margins of a small handwritten Bible . The existence of this Bible was known to 20th-century scholars from the book ‘Ammudé Shesh by Shemuel Shelomo Boyarski , and then the actual Bible itself

4680-704: The Aleppo Codex has many virtues. In its text of the Prophets (where it is nearly complete) it has fewer spelling errors than either the Leningrad Codex or the Cairo Codex. It has long been known that there are nine spelling differences (insignificant to meaning) between manuscripts of either Ashkenaz or Sefardic origin and manuscripts of Yemenite origin—and the Aleppo Codex sides with the Yemenite manuscripts on those differences. The Aleppo Codex conforms consistently to Maimonides's quotations of Scripture, which

4800-485: The Aleppo Codex, in a large exhibit edition, and the next year in a general trade edition with a companion volume. The edition is based on the latest scholarship concerning the biblical text and on the last version edited by Mordechai Breuer , the recipient of the 1999 Israel Prize in Bible Scholarship. The book was entirely set in print by computer, using a new computer program called "Tag", that could handle

4920-601: The Aleppo Jews. It was given first to Shlomo Zalman Shragai of the Jewish Agency , who later testified that the Codex was complete or nearly so at the time. Later that year it was given to the Ben-Zvi Institute . Still during 1958, the Jewish community of Aleppo sued the Ben-Zvi Institute for the return of the Codex, but the court ruled against them and suppressed publication of the proceedings. In

Jerusalem Crown - Misplaced Pages Continue

5040-463: The Bible "often juxtaposes contradictory ideas, without explanation or apology". The Hebrew Bible contains assumptions about the nature of knowledge, belief, truth, interpretation, understanding and cognitive processes. Ethicist Michael V. Fox writes that the primary axiom of the book of Proverbs is that "the exercise of the human mind is the necessary and sufficient condition of right and successful behavior in all reaches of life". The Bible teaches

5160-404: The Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon . Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration , but the way they understand what that means and interpret the text varies. The religious texts were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest contained the first five books of

5280-459: The Bible, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch (meaning five books ) in Greek. The second-oldest part was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies (the Nevi'im ). The third collection (the Ketuvim ) contains psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories. " Tanakh " is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible composed of the first letters of those three parts of the Hebrew scriptures:

5400-778: The Bible. A number of biblical canons have since evolved. Christian biblical canons range from the 73 books of the Catholic Church canon, and the 66-book canon of most Protestant denominations, to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon, among others. Judaism has long accepted a single authoritative text, whereas Christianity has never had an official version, instead having many different manuscript traditions. All biblical texts were treated with reverence and care by those that copied them, yet there are transmission errors, called variants, in all biblical manuscripts. A variant

5520-487: The Cave of Elijah. It was regarded as the community's most sacred possession: Those in trouble would pray before it, and oaths were taken by it. The community received queries from Jews around the world, who asked that various textual details be checked, correspondence which is preserved in the responsa literature, and which allows for the reconstruction of certain details in the parts that are missing today. Most importantly, in

5640-437: The Codex was in Israel, it was found that no more than 294 of the original (estimated) 487 pages survived. The missing leaves are a subject of fierce controversy. Originally it was thought they were destroyed by fire, but scholarly analysis has shown no evidence of fire having reached the codex itself (the dark marks on the pages are due to fungus). Some scholars instead accuse members of the Jewish community of having torn off

5760-407: The Codex would be hit by the curse. The consonants in the codex were copied by the scribe Shlomo ben Buya'a in Palestine circa 920. The text was then verified, vocalized, and provided with Masoretic notes by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher , the last and most prominent member of the ben Asher dynasty of grammarians from Tiberias , rivals to the ben Naphtali school. The tradition of ben Asher has become

5880-698: The Former Prophets ( Nevi'im Rishonim נביאים ראשונים , the narrative books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) and the Latter Prophets ( Nevi'im Aharonim נביאים אחרונים , the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets ). The Nevi'im tell a story of the rise of the Hebrew monarchy and its division into two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah , focusing on conflicts between

6000-573: The Galilean cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, and in Babylonia (modern Iraq). Those living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee ( c.  750 –950), made scribal copies of the Hebrew Bible texts without a standard text, such as the Babylonian tradition had, to work from. The canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (called Tiberian Hebrew) that they developed, and many of

6120-548: The Hebrew Bible was produced. During the rise of Christianity in the first century CE, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. Christians eventually called these new scriptures the "New Testament" and began referring to the Septuagint as the "Old Testament". The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of

SECTION 50

#1732779913914

6240-546: The Hebrew Bible was written with spaces between words to aid in reading. By the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel signs. Levites or scribes maintained the texts, and some texts were always treated as more authoritative than others. Scribes preserved and changed the texts by changing the script and updating archaic forms while also making corrections. These Hebrew texts were copied with great care. Considered to be scriptures ( sacred , authoritative religious texts),

6360-576: The Horev edition. The Jerusalem Crown is a printed edition of the Aleppo Codex , known in Hebrew as the כתר ארם צובה ( Keter Aram Tsovah – "Crown of Aleppo"), a Masoretic codex worked up circa 929 CE and claimed to have been proofread and provided with vowel points and accents by the great Masoretic master, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher . The Misplaced Pages article on the Aleppo Codex provides further details and history of this important manuscript. During

6480-398: The Israel Museum, because the photographs of the manuscript left some doubts. Certain changes were actively introduced to bring the Aleppo text more into conformity with modern printed Bibles; for example, half-vowels are rather frequently used in the Aleppo Codex but were omitted from the printed edition because contrary to the modern pronunciation of the text; a stress mark called a ga'ayot

6600-560: The Karaite elders of Ascalon , the more descriptive of the two, states that the money borrowed from Alexandria was used to "buy back two hundred and thirty Bible codices, a hundred other volumes, and eight Torah Scrolls." The documents were transported to Egypt via a caravan led and funded by the prominent Alexandrian official Abu’l-Fadl Sahl b. Yūsha’ b. Sha‘yā, who was in Ascalon for his wedding in early 1100. Judeo-Arabic inscriptions on

6720-482: The Leningrad Codex does not. Nahum Ben-Zvi, who conceived the idea of publishing the Jerusalem Crown, prepared the text of the Aleppo Codex for the press in a three-column layout, thus preserving the original layout of many of the most important Jewish manuscripts. The Jerusalem Crown was the first publication to return to this layout since the invention of the printing press. The project was made possible by

6840-460: The Masoretic notes were almost totally omitted and the printed edition showed only some of the original Codex's qere and ketiv notes and incompletely indicated the Codex's sedarim divisions, the printed edition lacked the rafe cantillation mark and the ornamentation that marks the beginning of each parsha . Certain bits of text had to be compared with the Codex itself, which was on display in

6960-471: The Prophets, and a substantial portion of the Ketuvim was missing (the surviving text ended at Song of Songs 3:11; completely lost were Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah—as well as some pages in the midst of surviving books). Starting in 1986, the Israel Museum took ten years to remove a thousand years' accumulation of dirt, and even fungus, from the manuscript, and do other restorative work. The Bible scholar Mordechai Breuer made

7080-529: The Septuagint as the basis of the Old Testament . The early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels , Pauline epistles , and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament . With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. It has had

7200-576: The Torah ("Teaching"), the Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("Writings"). The Masoretic Text is the medieval version of the Tanakh, in Hebrew and Aramaic, that is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by modern Rabbinic Judaism . The Septuagint is a Koine Greek translation of the Tanakh from the third and second centuries BC; it largely overlaps with the Hebrew Bible. Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism , using

7320-411: The World Register and was included in 2015. The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem received the book from Israel ben Simha of Basra sometime between 1040 and 1050. It was cared for by the brothers Hizkiyahu and Joshya, Karaite religious leaders who eventually moved to Fustat (today part of Old Cairo ) in 1050. The codex, however, stayed in Jerusalem until the latter part of that century. After

SECTION 60

#1732779913914

7440-427: The airs of sophisticated Hellenistic writers. It is a time-span which encompasses the compositions of Homer , Plato , Aristotle , Thucydides , Sophocles , Caesar , Cicero , and Catullus . It is a period which sees the rise and fall of the Assyrian empire (twelfth to seventh century) and of the Persian empire (sixth to fourth century), Alexander 's campaigns (336–326), the rise of Rome and its domination of

7560-476: The area of Aleppo in Syria. Kether is a translation of Arabic taj , originally Persian taj ; the codex was called al-Taj by locals until the modern period. In Arabic, the term taj was used mostly as a stock superlative title (Muslim caliphs did not wear crowns) and applied liberally to model codices. It lost this sense when translated into Hebrew as kether , which has only the literal sense of crown. The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased

7680-399: The availability of computerized typesetting. The poetic passages in the Pentateuch and the Prophets are printed in the traditional layout (“half-bricks set over whole bricks”). The Song at the Sea (Exodus chapter 15) is presented as a single unit, on a separate page. The books of Job , Proverbs , and Psalms have been printed in a different layout; each verse of these books being presented in

7800-456: The belief in God as the source of justice and the judge of all, including those administering justice on earth. Carmy and Schatz say the Bible "depicts the character of God, presents an account of creation, posits a metaphysics of divine providence and divine intervention, suggests a basis for morality, discusses many features of human nature, and frequently poses the notorious conundrum of how God can allow evil." The authoritative Hebrew Bible

7920-508: The books of Ketuvim in the order they appear in most current printed editions. The Jewish textual tradition never finalized the order of the books in Ketuvim. The Babylonian Talmud ( Bava Batra 14b–15a) gives their order as Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations of Jeremiah, Daniel, Scroll of Esther, Ezra, Chronicles. Aleppo Codex The Aleppo Codex ( Hebrew : כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא , romanized : Keṯer ʾĂrām-Ṣōḇāʾ , lit. 'Crown of Aleppo')

8040-421: The books were compiled by different religious communities into various biblical canons (official collections of scriptures). The earliest compilation, containing the first five books of the Bible and called the Torah (meaning "law", "instruction", or "teaching") or Pentateuch ("five books"), was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. A second collection of narrative histories and prophesies, called

8160-414: The city of Ur , eventually to settle in the land of Canaan , and how the Children of Israel later moved to Egypt. The remaining four books of the Torah tell the story of Moses , who lived hundreds of years after the patriarchs. He leads the Children of Israel from slavery in ancient Egypt to the renewal of their covenant with God at Mount Sinai and their wanderings in the desert until a new generation

8280-411: The codex about a hundred years after it was made. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, the synagogue was plundered and the codex was held for a high ransom, which was paid with money coming from Egypt, leading to the codex being transferred there. It was preserved at the Karaite , then at the Rabbanite synagogue in Old Cairo , where it was consulted by Maimonides , who described it as

8400-442: The codex that is accounted for is housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum . The codex's Hebrew name is כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא ‎ Keṯer ʾĂrām-Ṣōḇāʾ , translated as "Crown of Aleppo". Kether means "crown", and Aram-Ṣovaʾ (literally "outside Aram ") was a not-yet-identified biblical city in what is now Syria whose name was applied from the 11th century onward by some Rabbinic sources and Syrian Jews to

8520-439: The codex) that not only was it the oldest known masoretic Bible in a single volume, it was the first time ever that a complete Tanakh had been produced by one or two people as a unified entity in a consistent style. During the 1991 Gulf War, and again during the 2023 Israel-Hamas War, the scrolls were temporarily removed from display and placed in secure storage as part of the Israel Museum's emergency protocol. Later, after

8640-594: The conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the neo-Babylonian Empire and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem . The Former Prophets are the books Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. They contain narratives that begin immediately after the death of Moses with the divine appointment of Joshua as his successor, who then leads the people of Israel into the Promised Land , and end with the release from imprisonment of

8760-542: The culture of the fourth century Roman empire. The Bible has been used to support the death penalty , patriarchy , sexual intolerance , the violence of total war , and colonialism ; it has also been used to support charity , culture, healthcare and education . The term "Bible" can refer to the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible, which contains both the Old and New Testaments . The English word Bible

8880-668: The early Christian church translated its canon into Vulgar Latin (the common Latin spoken by ordinary people), a translation known as the Vulgate . Since then, Catholic Christians have held ecumenical councils to standardize their biblical canon. The Council of Trent (1545–63), held by the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation , authorized the Vulgate as its official Latin translation of

9000-525: The edges of the pages were found to be mold rather than fire damage. When the Aleppo Codex was complete (until 1947), it followed the Tiberian textual tradition in the order of its books, similar to the Leningrad Codex , and which also matches the later tradition of Sephardi biblical manuscripts. The Torah and the Nevi'im appear in the same order found in most printed Hebrew Bibles, but

9120-466: The end of the Talmudic period ( c.  300 – c.  500 CE ), but the actual date is difficult to determine. In the sixth and seventh centuries, three Jewish communities contributed systems for writing the precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora (from which we derive the term "masoretic"). These early Masoretic scholars were based primarily in

9240-521: The end; all of Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah. In 2016, the scholar Yosef Ofer published a newly recovered fragment of the Aleppo Codex with some portions of the Book of Exodus 8. Several complete or partial editions of the Tanakh based on the Aleppo Codex have been published over the past three decades in Israel, some of them under the academic auspices of Israeli universities. These editions incorporate reconstructions of

9360-528: The exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah , Hilkhot Sefer Torah ("the Laws of the Torah Scroll") in his Mishneh Torah . This halachic ruling gave the Aleppo Codex the seal of supreme textual authority, albeit only with regard to the type of space preceding sections ( petuhot and setumot ) and for the manner of the writing of the songs in the Pentateuch. "The codex which we used in these works

9480-509: The fact that eyewitnesses in Aleppo who saw the Codex shortly after the fire consistently reported that it was complete or nearly complete, and then there is no account of it for more than a decade, until after it arrived in Israel and was put, in 1958, in the Ben-Zvi Institute, at which point it was as currently described; his book suggests a number of possibilities for the loss of the pages including theft in Israel. Documentary filmmaker Avi Dabach, great-grandson of Hacham Ezra Dabach (one of

9600-535: The first century BCE. Fragments of the Septuagint were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; portions of its text are also found on existing papyrus from Egypt dating to the second and first centuries BCE and to the first century CE. The Masoretes began developing what would become the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism near

9720-661: The first page of the Codex mention the book was then "transferred to the Jerusalemite synagogue in Fustat ." The Aleppo codex website reveals how the book changed hands. [It was] transferred [...] according to the law of redemption from imprisonment [in which it had fallen] in Jerusalem, the Holy City, may it be rebuilt and reestablished, to the congregation in Egypt of Knisat Yerushalayim, may it be built and established in

9840-547: The gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians over a relatively short period of time very soon after the originals were written. There is evidence in the Synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the early church fathers , from Marcion , and in the Didache that Christian documents were in circulation before the end of the first century. Paul's letters were circulated during his lifetime, and his death

9960-429: The handwritten notes made by scholars who had been privileged to handle the Codex could not be as completely reliable as the manuscript itself. For example, a number of them had, on different occasions, copied down, supposedly word-for-word, the dedicatory colophon of the Codex (on a page now missing), which included some details of the manuscript's provenance—yet their different copies disagreed with each other. However,

10080-659: The last king of Judah . Treating Samuel and Kings as single books, they cover: The Latter Prophets are Isaiah , Jeremiah , Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets , counted as a single book. Ketuvim (in Biblical Hebrew : כְּתוּבִים , romanized:  Kəṯūḇīm "writings") is the third and final section of the Tanakh. The Ketuvim are believed to have been written under the inspiration of Ruach HaKodesh (the Holy Spirit) but with one level less authority than that of prophecy . In Masoretic manuscripts (and some printed editions), Psalms, Proverbs and Job are presented in

10200-516: The last caretakers of the Codex when it was still in Syria), announced in December 2015 an upcoming film tracing the history of the Codex and possibly determining the fate of the missing pages. The film, titled The Lost Crown  [ he ] , was released in 2018. In January 1958, the Aleppo Codex was smuggled out of Syria and sent to Jerusalem to be placed in the care of the chief rabbi of

10320-605: The late 1980s, the codex was placed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum . This finally gave scholars the chance to examine it and consider the claims that it is indeed the manuscript referred to by Maimonides. The work of Moshe Goshen-Gottstein on the few surviving pages of the Torah seems to have confirmed these claims beyond reasonable doubt. Goshen-Gottstein suggested (in the introduction to his facsimile reprint of

10440-467: The late third century BCE and completed by 132 BCE. Probably commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus , King of Egypt, it addressed the need of the primarily Greek-speaking Jews of the Graeco-Roman diaspora. Existing complete copies of the Septuagint date from the third to the fifth centuries CE, with fragments dating back to the second century BCE. Revision of its text began as far back as

10560-526: The latest books collected and designated as authoritative in the Jewish canon even though they were not complete until the second century CE. The books of Esther , Daniel , Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles share a distinctive style that no other Hebrew literary text, biblical or extra-biblical, shares. They were not written in the normal style of Hebrew of the post-exilic period. The authors of these books must have chosen to write in their own distinctive style for unknown reasons. The following list presents

10680-653: The letters, vowel points, accents, and the special characters. In previous editions around the world, only the majority of the text could be typeset by machine but the special characters had to be positioned by hand. The new font had to be designed by Zvi Narkiss with a repertory of 138 characters - letters, vowel points, accents, - and then special characters (certain letters are uncommonly large or small or superscript or inverted according to Masoretic tradition), many of them used only once. As with all printed Hebrew Bibles, there were about three million characters - letters, vowels, accents, and other marks - to be typeset. Although

10800-455: The life of Israel. Blessed be he who preserves it and cursed be he who steals it, and cursed be he who sells it, and cursed be he who pawns it. It may not be sold and it may not be defiled forever. The Aleppo community guarded the Codex zealously for some 600 years: it was kept, together with three other Biblical manuscripts, in a special cupboard (later, an iron safe) in a basement chapel of the Central Synagogue of Aleppo , supposed to have been

10920-413: The missing leaves and keeping them privately hidden. Two missing portions of the manuscript—a single complete leaf from the Book of Chronicles and a fragment of a page from the Book of Exodus —were turned up from such sources in the 1980s, leaving open the possibility that even more may have survived the riots in 1947. In particular, the 2012 book The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman calls attention to

11040-414: The missing parts of the codex based on the methodology of Mordechai Breuer or similar systems, and by taking into account all available historical testimony about the contents of the codex. Complete Tanakh: These are complete editions of the Tanakh , usually in one volume (but sometimes also sold in three volumes, and, as noted, in more). Apart from the last, they do not include the masoretic notes of

11160-452: The most authoritative documents from which to copy other texts. Even so, David Carr asserts that Hebrew texts still contain some variants. The majority of all variants are accidental, such as spelling errors, but some changes were intentional. In the Hebrew text, "memory variants" are generally accidental differences evidenced by such things as the shift in word order found in 1 Chronicles 17:24 and 2 Samuel 10:9 and 13. Variants also include

11280-525: The nature of authority and the sharing of power, animals, trees and nature, money and economics, work, relationships, sorrow and despair and the nature of joy, among others. Philosopher and ethicist Jaco Gericke adds: "The meaning of good and evil, the nature of right and wrong, criteria for moral discernment, valid sources of morality, the origin and acquisition of moral beliefs, the ontological status of moral norms, moral authority, cultural pluralism, [as well as] axiological and aesthetic assumptions about

11400-443: The nature of valid arguments, the nature and power of language, and its relation to reality. According to Mittleman, the Bible provides patterns of moral reasoning that focus on conduct and character. In the biblical metaphysic, humans have free will, but it is a relative and restricted freedom. Beach says that Christian voluntarism points to the will as the core of the self, and that within human nature, "the core of who we are

11520-404: The nature of value and beauty. These are all implicit in the texts." However, discerning the themes of some biblical texts can be problematic. Much of the Bible is in narrative form and in general, biblical narrative refrains from any kind of direct instruction, and in some texts the author's intent is not easy to decipher. It is left to the reader to determine good and bad, right and wrong, and

11640-470: The notes they made, therefore differed from the Babylonian. These differences were resolved into a standard text called the Masoretic text in the ninth century. The oldest complete copy still in existence is the Leningrad Codex dating to c. 1000 CE. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah maintained by the Samaritan community since antiquity, which was rediscovered by European scholars in

11760-407: The oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments. The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew , a kind of cuneiform pictograph similar to other pictographs of the same period. The exile to Babylon most likely prompted the shift to square script (Aramaic) in the fifth to third centuries BCE. From the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

11880-431: The one accepted for the Hebrew Bible . The ben Asher vocalization is late and in many respects artificial, compared to other traditions and tendencies reaching back closer to the period of spoken Biblical Hebrew. The Leningrad Codex , which dates to approximately the same time as the Aleppo codex, has been claimed by Paul E. Kahle to be a product of the ben Asher scriptorium . However, its colophon says only that it

12000-639: The order for the books for Ketuvim differs markedly. In the Aleppo Codex, the order of the Ketuvim is Books of Chronicles , Psalms , Book of Job , Book of Proverbs , Book of Ruth , Song of Songs , Ecclesiastes , Book of Lamentations , Book of Esther , Book of Daniel , and Book of Ezra and Book of Nehemiah . The current text is missing all of the Pentateuch to the Book of Deuteronomy 28.17; II Kings 14.21–18.13; Book of Jeremiah 29.9–31.33; 32.2–4, 9–11, 21–24; Book of Amos 8.12– Book of Micah 5.1; So 3.20–Za 9.17; II Chronicles 26.19–35.7; Book of Psalms 15.1–25.2 (MT enumeration); Song of Songs 3.11 to

12120-427: The path to understanding and practice is rarely straightforward. God is sometimes portrayed as having a role in the plot, but more often there is little about God's reaction to events, and no mention at all of approval or disapproval of what the characters have done or failed to do. The writer makes no comment, and the reader is left to infer what they will. Jewish philosophers Shalom Carmy and David Schatz explain that

12240-621: The pogrom on December 1, 1947 (two days after the United Nations voted to recommend partition of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state) the Syrian Army firebombed the Great Synagogue of Aleppo and the Codex was originally reported as completely destroyed. In fact, more than two-thirds of the Codex survived and was later (ca. 1957) smuggled into Israel. At that time only 294 pages were gotten (later one more page

12360-439: The praise heaped upon it by Maimonides in the late 12th century, and partly also to its claim to have been personally proofread and marked with the vowel points and accents by the last of the great family of Masoretes, Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher, not only by matching the various descriptions which had been published, but also by matching descriptions by Maimonides in documents which had not yet been published. As might be expected,

12480-419: The seventh century, the first codex form of the Hebrew Bible was produced. The codex is the forerunner of the modern book. Popularized by early Christians, it was made by folding a single sheet of papyrus in half, forming "pages". Assembling multiples of these folded pages together created a "book" that was more easily accessible and more portable than scrolls. In 1488, the first complete printed press version of

12600-535: The substitution of lexical equivalents, semantic and grammar differences, and larger scale shifts in order, with some major revisions of the Masoretic texts that must have been intentional. Intentional changes in New Testament texts were made to improve grammar, eliminate discrepancies, harmonize parallel passages, combine and simplify multiple variant readings into one, and for theological reasons. Bruce K. Waltke observes that one variant for every ten words

12720-517: The synagogue was torched during 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo . The fate of the codex during the subsequent decade is unclear: when it resurfaced in Israel in 1958, roughly 40% of the manuscript—including the majority of the Torah section—was missing, and only two additional leaves have been recovered since then. The original supposition that the missing pages were destroyed in the synagogue fire has increasingly been challenged, fueling speculation that they survive in private hands. The portion of

12840-411: The text of this edition was closely based on Breuer's edition, there were a very few departures where conscientious examination of the Codex itself indicated that Breuer had departed from the Aleppo text. This edition was published in a popular edition, with a Companion Volume in Hebrew and English, in 2002 to great praise. However, there was also a smattering of scholarly criticism. For example, that

12960-418: The twenty-first century are only in the beginning stages of exploring "the interface between writing, performance, memorization, and the aural dimension" of the texts. Current indications are that writing and orality were not separate so much as ancient writing was learned in a context of communal oral performance. The Bible was written and compiled by many people , who many scholars say are mostly unknown, from

13080-457: The university denied him access to the codex, Mordechai Breuer began his own reconstruction of the Masoretic text on the basis of other well-known ancient manuscripts. His results matched the Aleppo Codex almost exactly. Thus today, Breuer's version is used authoritatively for the reconstruction of the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex. The Jerusalem Crown (כתר ירושלים, Keter Yerushalayim, lit. "Jerusalem Crown"), printed in Jerusalem in 2000,

13200-496: Was almost as distinguished and authoritative. He produced an edition of this reconstructed Bible for the Mossad Harav Kook, in Jerusalem, in 1989 and again (slightly revised) in 1998. Additionally, a photo-facsimile edition of the surviving pages of the Aleppo Codex was published by Nahum Ben-Zvi in 1976. The pages smuggled into Israel were verified as the authentic Aleppo Codex, which owed its high reputation partly to

13320-447: Was believed that women allowed to look at it would become pregnant, and that those in charge of the keys to the Codex vault were blessed. On the other hand, community elders have written at the top of some pages "Sacred to Yahweh, not to be sold or defiled" and "Cursed be he who steals it, and cursed be he who sells it". The community feared being destroyed by a plague, should they lose the Codex, and they believed that he who stole or sold

13440-414: Was corrected from manuscripts written by ben Asher; there is no evidence that ben Asher himself ever saw it. However, the same holds true for the Aleppo Codex, which was apparently not vocalized by ben Asher himself, although a later colophon, which was added to the manuscript after his death, attributes the vocalization to him. The community of Damascus possessed a counterpart of the Aleppo Codex, known as

13560-510: Was discovered by Yosef Ofer in 1989. However, the community limited direct observation of the manuscript by outsiders, especially by scholars in modern times. Paul E. Kahle , when revising the text of the Biblia Hebraica in the 1920s, tried and failed to obtain a photographic copy. This forced him to use the Leningrad Codex instead for the third edition, which appeared in 1937. The only modern scholar allowed to compare it with

13680-597: Was exported to Greece. The Greek ta biblia ("the books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books". The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew , delivered between 386 and 388 CE) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together. Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ( tà biblía tà hágia , "the holy books"). Medieval Latin biblia

13800-686: Was noted in the recent critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, leaving 90% of the Hebrew text without variation. The fourth edition of the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament notes variants affecting about 500 out of 6900 words, or about 7% of the text. The narratives, laws, wisdom sayings, parables, and unique genres of the Bible provide opportunity for discussion on most topics of concern to human beings: The role of women, sex, children, marriage, neighbours, friends,

13920-594: Was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes. These differing histories produced what modern scholars refer to as recognizable "text types". The four most commonly recognized are Alexandrian , Western , Caesarean , and Byzantine . The list of books included in the Catholic Bible was established as canon by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. Between 385 and 405 CE,

14040-423: Was rarely used in the Aleppo Codex but is more common in modern editions - so the Aleppo appearances of this mark are shown slightly differently than the many added to make the edition conform to modern usage. Additionally, the relatively few qere and ketiv notes that remain are put at the very bottom of a column, without any indication of the verse to which they are related, a style which becomes more confusing when

14160-412: Was ready to enter the land of Canaan. The Torah ends with the death of Moses. The commandments in the Torah provide the basis for Jewish religious law . Tradition states that there are 613 commandments ( taryag mitzvot ). Nevi'im ( Hebrew : נְבִיאִים , romanized :  Nəḇī'īm , "Prophets") is the second main division of the Tanakh, between the Torah and Ketuvim. It contains two sub-groups,

14280-507: Was smuggled into Israel by Syrian Jew Murad Faham, and presented to the president of the state, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi . Some time after arrival, it was found that parts of the codex had been lost. The Aleppo Codex was entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute and Hebrew University of Jerusalem . It is currently (2019) on display in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum . The Aleppo Codex was submitted by Israel for inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of

14400-466: Was turned in) from an original total whose estimates run from 380 to 491 pages (possibly the lowest estimate is for the Bible text alone and the higher estimates include appendices such as Masoretic notes, treatises on grammar, etc., such as are part of the Leningrad Codex). In general, most of the Torah was missing (the surviving text started at Deuteronomy 28:17), some pages were missing from

#913086