Bible Synapse
Aleppo Codex
Manuscript · c. AD 920–930 · Bible manuscripts
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- Date
- c. AD 920–930 (the copying in Tiberias (estimated; it has no dated colophon))
- Found
- Central Synagogue, Aleppo, Syria, 1958. Kept by the Jews of Aleppo for about 600 years. Rioters set fire to the synagogue in 1947, and many of its pages went missing around that time. In January 1958 it was smuggled out of Syria to Jerusalem and entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute.
- Now
- Israel Museum (Shrine of the Book), on behalf of the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem
- Passages
- Deuteronomy 28:17, Deuteronomy 32:1–43
What it is
A bound parchment book of the Hebrew Bible with vowel signs, accents and the scribal notes known as the Masorah. The scribe Shlomo ben Buya’a copied the consonants, and a later note credits the vowels and notes to Aaron ben Asher, the leading Masorete of Tiberias. About 294 pages remain of an original 487 or so.
How it connects to the Bible
It is a key witness to the Masoretic text, the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and it is widely identified as the codex Maimonides relied on when he set out the rules for writing Torah scrolls, above all the layout of paragraphs and of the poems in the Pentateuch. Almost all of the Torah is now lost: the surviving part begins at Deuteronomy 28:17. The Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32) survives, with the traditional layout of the poem and of the six lines before it that Maimonides and a Cairo Genizah fragment also describe.
What scholars debate
How the missing pages were lost after the 1947 riot is disputed, and later study found no sign that the fire reached the codex itself; a few leaves and fragments have since come to light.