The Aleppo Codex ( he, כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא, romanized: , lit. 'Crown of Aleppo') is a medieval bound manuscript of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' codex was written in the city of

Tiberias Tiberias ( ; he, טְבֶרְיָה, ; ar, طبريا, Ṭabariyyā) is an Israeli city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. A major Jewish center during Late Antiquity, it has been considered since the 16th century one of Judaism's F ...

in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the

Abbasid Caliphate The Abbasid Caliphate ( or ; ar, الْخِلَافَةُ الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, ') was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttal ...

, and was endorsed for its accuracy by

Maimonides Musa ibn Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (); la, Moses Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym Rambam ( he, רמב״ם), was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah ...

. Together with the Leningrad Codex, it contains the Ben-Asher

masoretic The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...

tradition. The codex was kept for five centuries in the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, until the synagogue was torched during anti-Jewish riots in 1947. 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 The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the ...

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 the codex that is accounted for is housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

Name

The Hebrew name is , translated as "Crown of Aleppo": ''keter'' means "crown", and Aram-Zobah was a not-yet-identified biblical city in modern Syria, whose name was applied from the 11th century onward by some

Rabbinical Rabbinic Judaism ( he, יהדות רבנית, Yahadut Rabanit), also called Rabbinism, Rabbinicism, or Judaism espoused by the Rabbanites, has been the mainstream form of Judaism since the 6th century CE, after the codification of the Babylonia ...

sources and Syrian Jews, to the area of Aleppo in Syria.

History

Overview

The Karaite Jewish community of

Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...

purchased 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

, who described it as a text trusted by all Jewish scholars. It is rumoured that in 1375 one of Maimonides' descendants brought it to Aleppo,

Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...

, 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 The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as R ...

burned down the synagogue where it was kept. The Codex disappeared, then reemerged in 1958, when it was smuggled into Israel by

Syrian Jew Syrian Jews ( he, יהודי סוריה ''Yehudey Surya'', ar, الْيَهُود السُّورِيُّون ''al-Yahūd as-Sūriyyūn'', colloquially called SYs in the United States) are Jews who lived in the region of the modern state of Syri ...

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 the World Register and was included in 2015.

Ransom from Crusaders (1100)

The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem received the book from Israel ben Simha of

Basra Basra ( ar, ٱلْبَصْرَة, al-Baṣrah) is an Iraqi city located on the Shatt al-Arab. It had an estimated population of 1.4 million in 2018. Basra is also Iraq's main port, although it does not have deep water access, which is han ...

sometime between 1040 and 1050. Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith. ''Karaite marriage documents from the Cairo Geniza: legal tradition and community life in mediaeval Egypt and Palestine.'' Etudes sur le judaïsme médiéval, t. 20. Leiden: Brill, 1998 (), pg. 148 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 the Siege of Jerusalem (1099) during the

First Crusade The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic ...

, the Crusaders held the codex and other holy works for ransom, along with Jewish survivors.Olszowy: pp. 54-55 and footnote #86The Vicissitudes of the Aleppo Codex
nbsp;– See ''4.4 The Crusades and the Ransoming of Books''. Retrieved on 2008–03–04. 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 Judeo-Arabic dialects (, ; ; ) are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, enco ...

letters were discovered by noted Jewish historian

Shelomo Dov Goitein Shelomo Dov Goitein (April 3, 1900 – February 6, 1985) was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza. Biography Shelomo Dov (Frit ...

in 1952. The ''

Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon (c. 1100) was a communication written by six elders of the Karaite Jewish community of Ascalon and sent to their coreligionists in Alexandria nine months after the fall of Jerusalem during the First Cr ...

'', the more descriptive of the two, states that the money borrowed from

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...

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 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.

In Aleppo

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 the

Cave of Elijah Cave of Elijah is the name used for two grottoes on Mount Carmel, in Haifa, Israel, associated with Biblical prophet Elijah. According to tradition, Elijah is believed to have prayed at a grotto before challenging the priests of Baal on Mount Car ...

. 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 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 Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus ...

. 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 was discovered by

Yosef Ofer Yosef (; also transliterated as Yossef, Josef, Yoseph Tiberian Hebrew and Aramaic ''Yôsēp̄'') is a Hebrew male name derived from the Biblical character Joseph. The name can also consist of the Hebrew yadah meaning "praise", "fame" and the word ...

in 1989. However, the community limited direct observation of the manuscript by outsiders, especially by scholars in modern times.

Paul E. Kahle Paul Ernst Kahle (January 21, 1875 in Hohenstein, Prussia – September 24, 1964 in Düsseldorf) was a German orientalist and scholar. Biography Kahle studied orientalism and theology in Marburg and Halle. He attained his doctorate in 1898. ...

, 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 a standard printed

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Umberto Cassuto Umberto Cassuto, also known as Moshe David Cassuto (16 September 1883 – 19 December 1951), was an Italian historian, a rabbi, and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic literature, in the University of Florence, then at the University ...

, 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.

Loss of pages (1947–1958)

During the 1947 Anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo, the community's ancient synagogue was burned. Later, while the Codex was in Israel, it was found that no more than 294 of the original (estimated) 487 pages survived.Hayim Tawil & Bernard Schneider, ''Crown of Aleppo'' (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Soc., 2010) page 110; there have been various reports and estimates of the original number of pages; Izhak Ben-Zvi, "The Codex of Ben Asher", ''Textus,'' vol. 1 (1960) page 2, reprinted in Sid Z. Leiman, ed., ''The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible, an Introductory Reader'' (NY,

KTAV Publishing House KTAV Publishing House is a publishing house located in Brooklyn, New York. Ktav means "to write" in Hebrew. Founded in 1921, it has been among the most notable publishers of Judaica and Jewish educational texts since the middle of the 20th cent ...

, 1974) page 758 (estimating an original number of 380 pages). 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 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 The Book of Exodus (from grc, Ἔξοδος, translit=Éxodos; he, שְׁמוֹת ''Šəmōṯ'', "Names") is the second book of the Bible. It narrates the story of the Exodus, in which the Israelites leave slavery in Biblical Egypt through ...

—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 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.Friedman (2012) ch. 24 and ''passim''.

Documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

maker Avi Dabach, great-grandson of Hacham Ezra Dabach (one of 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.

In Israel

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 the Aleppo Jews. It was given first to Shlomo Zalman Shragai of the

Jewish Agency The Jewish Agency for Israel ( he, הסוכנות היהודית לארץ ישראל, translit=HaSochnut HaYehudit L'Eretz Yisra'el) formerly known as The Jewish Agency for Palestine, is the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world. ...

, 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 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 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 The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Mordechai Breuer Mordechai Breuer ( he, מָרְדְּכַי בְּרוֹיֶאר; May 14, 1921 – February 24, 2007) was a German-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi. He was one of the world's leading experts on Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), and especially of the text of the ...

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 The Jerusalem Crown ( Keter Yerushalayim) is a printed edition of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) printed in Jerusalem in 2001, and based on a manuscript commonly known as the Aleppo Crown). The printed text consists of 874 pages of the Hebrew ...

'' (כתר ירושלים, Keter Yerushalayim, lit. "Jerusalem Crown"), printed in Jerusalem in 2000, 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.

Superstitions

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 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 the Codex would be hit by the curse.

Authoritative text

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

, rivals to the ben Naphtali school. The tradition of ben Asher has become the one accepted for the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' 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 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 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 The National Library of Israel (NLI; he, הספרייה הלאומית, translit=HaSifria HaLeumit; ar, المكتبة الوطنية في إسرائيل), formerly Jewish National and University Library (JNUL; he, בית הספרים הלא� ...

as "ms. Heb 5702". It is available online her

(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 the exact rules for writing scrolls of the

, ''Hilkhot Sefer Torah'' ("the Laws of the Torah Scroll") in his ''

Mishneh Torah The ''Mishneh Torah'' ( he, מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה, , repetition of the Torah), also known as ''Sefer Yad ha-Hazaka'' ( he, ספר יד החזקה, , book of the strong hand, label=none), is a code of Rabbinic Jewish religious law ('' ...

''. 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 is the codex known in

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

, which includes 24 books, which was in

," he wrote.

David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra David ben Solomon ibn (Abi) Zimra ( he, ר׳ דָּוִד בֶּן שְׁלֹמֹה אִבְּן אָבִי זִמְרָא) (1479–1573) also called Radbaz (רַדְבָּ"ז) after the initials of his name, Rabbi David iBn Zimra, was an early A ...

testifies to this being the same codex that was later transferred to Aleppo.

Physical description

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 is parchment, 33 cm high by 26.5 cm wide (13 inches x 10.43 inches). In particular, only the last few pages of the

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 the edges of the pages were found to be mold rather than

fire Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition point, flames ...

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 Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefa ...

biblical manuscripts. The

and the

Nevi'im Nevi'im (; he, נְבִיאִים ''Nəvīʾīm'', Tiberian: ''Năḇīʾīm,'' "Prophets", literally "spokespersons") is the second major division of the Hebrew Bible (the '' Tanakh''), lying between the Torah (instruction) and Ketuvim ...

appear in the same order found in most printed Hebrew Bibles, but the order for the books for

Ketuvim The Ketuvim (; hbo, , Modern: ''Kəṯūvīm'', Tiberian: ''Kăṯūḇīm'' "writings") is the third and final section of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), after Torah (instruction) and Nevi'im (prophets). In English translations of the Hebrew Bi ...

differs markedly. In the Aleppo Codex, the order of the Ketuvim is

Books of Chronicles The Book of Chronicles ( he, דִּבְרֵי־הַיָּמִים ) is a book in the Hebrew Bible, found as two books (1–2 Chronicles) in the Christian Old Testament. Chronicles is the final book of the Hebrew Bible, concluding the third sec ...

Psalms The Book of Psalms ( or ; he, תְּהִלִּים, , lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the ("Writings"), the third section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. The title is derived ...

, Book of Job, Book of Proverbs, Book of Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Book of Lamentations, Book of Esther,

Book of Daniel The Book of Daniel is a 2nd-century BC biblical apocalypse with a 6th century BC setting. Ostensibly "an account of the activities and visions of Daniel, a noble Jew exiled at Babylon", it combines a prophecy of history with an eschatology (a ...

, and

Book of Ezra The Book of Ezra is a book of the Hebrew Bible; which formerly included the Book of Nehemiah in a single book, commonly distinguished in scholarship as Ezra–Nehemiah. The two became separated with the first printed rabbinic bibles of the e ...

and Book of Nehemiah. The current text is missing all of the

Pentateuch The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the ...

to the Book of Deuteronomy 28.17;

II Kings The Book of Kings (, '' Sēfer Məlāḵīm'') is a book in the Hebrew Bible, found as two books (1–2 Kings) in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. It concludes the Deuteronomistic history, a history of Israel also including the book ...

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 the end; all of Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah.

Modern editions

Several complete or partial editions of the

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 The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Mossad HaRav Kook edition,

Mordechai Breuer Mordechai Breuer ( he, מָרְדְּכַי בְּרוֹיֶאר; May 14, 1921 – February 24, 2007) was a German-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi. He was one of the world's leading experts on Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), and especially of the text of the ...

, ed.

(1977); Nebi'im (1979);

Ketubim The Ketuvim (; hbo, , Modern: ''Kəṯūvīm'', Tiberian: ''Kăṯūḇīm'' "writings") is the third and final section of the Tanakh ( Hebrew Bible), after Torah (instruction) and Nevi'im (prophets). In English translations of the Hebrew ...

(1982); full

, ed. This was the first edition to incorporate newly discovered information on the parashah divisions of the Aleppo Codex for Nebi'im and

. The text of the Horev Tanakh has been reprinted in several forms with various commentaries by the same publisher, including a Mikraot Gedolot on the Torah.In this edition, the masoretic text and symbols were encoded and graphic layout was enabled by the computer program ''Taj'', developed by Daniel Weissman. # ''

: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem'', 2000. Edited according to the method of

under the supervision of Yosef Ofer, with additional proofreading and refinements since the Horev edition. # Jerusalem Simanim Institute, Feldheim Publishers, 2004 (published in one-volume and three-volume editions)."After consultation... with the greatest Torah scholars and grammarians, the biblical text in this edition was chosen to conform with the Aleppo Codex which as is well known was corrected by Ben-Asher... Where this manuscript is not extant we have relied on the Leningrad Codex... Similarly the open and closed

sections Section, Sectioning or Sectioned may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Section (music), a complete, but not independent, musical idea * Section (typography), a subdivision, especially of a chapter, in books and documents ** Section sig ...

that are missing in the Aleppo Codex have been completed according to the biblical list compiled by Rabbi Shalom Shachna Yelin that were published in the Jubilee volume for Rabbi Breuer... (translated from the Hebrew on p. 12 of the introduction). # Mikraot Gedolot Haketer, Bar-Ilan University (1992–present). A multi-volume critical edition of the Mikraot Gedolot, complete in 21 volumes: Genesis (2 vols.), Exodus (2 vols.), Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua & Judges (1 vol.), Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Minor Prophets, Psalms (2 vols.), Proverbs, Job, Five Megillot (1 vol.), Daniel-Ezra-Nehemiah (1 vol.), Chronicles. Includes the masoretic notes of the Aleppo Codex and a new commentary on them. Differs from the Breuer reconstruction and presentation for some masoretic details. Complete online Tanakh: * Mechon Mamre provides an online edition of the

Tanakh The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' niqqud In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in ...

), and (d) masoretic text with vowels and cantillation signs. See

external links An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either "external" or "internal" depending on their target or destination ...

below. * "Miqra according to the Mesorah" is an experimental, digital version of the Tanakh based on the Aleppo Codex with full documentation of the editorial policy and its implementation ( English-language abstract). * Full text of the Keter https://www.mgketer.org Partial editions: *

Hebrew University Bible Project The Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) is a project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to create the first edition of the Hebrew Bible that reproduces the text of the Aleppo Codex and includes a thorough critical apparatus. It was begun in 1 ...

(Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel). Includes the masoretic notes of the Aleppo Codex.

References

External links and further reading

The Aleppo Codex WebsiteMechon Mamre
- Electronic text of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Wikimedia Commons - full online digital images in several files.
Seforim Online
- two online digital images, each in a single large file (the same images are found at the Wikimedia Commons in several smaller files)
The History and Authority of the Aleppo Codex
by Yosef Ofer (pdf)
"Rival Owners, Sacred Text"
article in Wall Street Journal

Copies of the Aleppo Codex

* Matti Friedman, '' The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible'', Algonquin Books (May 15, 2012), hardcover, 320 pages, ,
"Author Blog: Codex vs. Kindle By Matti Friedman"
{{Authority control 10th-century books 10th-century biblical manuscripts Biblical manuscripts Hebrew Bible manuscripts Jews and Judaism in Aleppo Judaism in Syria Jewish manuscripts Jewish prayer and ritual texts Jewish Syrian history Aleppo Assyrian (Ashuri) script Collections of the Israel Museum 920s Torah