Leningrad Codex

One Man Did All of It

Medieval Hebrew Bibles were normally made by two people, a scribe for the consonants and a punctuator for the vowels and the masorah. This one was not. Its scribe says so himself, twice, in the manuscript: "I have written, vocalised and provided the masora of this codex," and again, "Samuel b. Jacob wrote, vocalised and provided the masora." B. Outhwaite, who heads the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library, calls it "a remarkable piece of solo entrepreneurship, producing single-handedly a luxury edition of the Hebrew Bible," and puts the raw materials at "at least 120 sheep for the 491 leaves." Samuel ben Jacob was a working scribe with clients; a later contract from the Cairo Geniza has him paid twenty-five dinars for a copy of the Prophets and Writings, at a time when a middle-class family's annual rent ran to five or six.

Two things everybody says about it are wrong, and Outhwaite corrects both from the manuscript's own words. It was not written in Cairo: the colophon says Fustat, the older city beside it, and Outhwaite notes that "some other translations of the opening of the colophon read 'Cairo'" and that the scribe is definitely referring to Fustat. And its date is not a single number. The colophon gives the year in five different reckonings at once — from creation, from the exile of King Jehoiachin, from the Seleucid era, from the destruction of the Second Temple, and from what it calls "the Kingdom of the Little Horn," a belittling name for Islam borrowed from Daniel 7:8 — and they do not agree with each other. Outhwaite works them out one by one and concludes: "A date of 1008-1009 CE seems reasonable... We should not expect absolute calendrical exactitude in a pre-modern text, particularly when the writer was probably not a specialist in the discipline." One of the five systems, the Jehoiachin reckoning, was used mainly by Karaites, and the man who commissioned the book probably came from a Karaite family — Outhwaite puts it no more strongly than that, and reports an open disagreement underneath it: "S. D. Goitein believes that Mevorak was a Karaite; E. Bareket, who also wrote about the case, suggests that there is not enough evidence to be sure." What tips it for Outhwaite is a Karaite legal deed of 1004 naming the patron's father in a position of trust in Karaite society, which "strongly suggests that the Ibn Yazdad family were themselves Persian Karaites" and would explain the scribe fitting his colophon to his customer.

How It Became the World's Hebrew Bible

It became the standard by default, and the reason is worth knowing because it is not the reason usually given. The Aleppo Codex is older and was regarded as better, and P. Kahle wanted it for the third edition of Biblia Hebraica in the 1920s. The community in Aleppo would not let him study it, let alone photograph it. J. A. Sanders and A. B. Beck, who tell that story, give no reason for the refusal: they say only that he could not persuade the synagogue officials. The reason usually attached to it is a general one about the whole period rather than about Kahle's visit, and P. Sanders of the Protestant Theological University states it without deriding it — through the decades before 1947 even rabbis and scholars of good reputation were hardly ever allowed to consult the book, "because the holders feared that it might be stolen or damaged." The two Sanderses are unrelated, and this article keeps them apart by initial throughout, because a bare surname here sends a reader to the wrong man. The Leningrad Codex he could get: in 1926 he was allowed to take it to Leipzig. So the base text of Biblia Hebraica, and then of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Biblia Hebraica Quinta, is this manuscript — which means, as Outhwaite puts it, that its "consonants, vowels and accents... form the base text for the most widely used of scholarly editions," and behind those stand the Old Testaments on most English shelves. That happened twenty years before the fire in Aleppo, not because of it.

The manuscript itself passed through the hands of a nineteenth-century collector whose reputation complicates it. A. Firkovich — a Karaite leader of standing, and by Sanders and Beck's account a prosperous and renowned one — assembled the greatest collection of Hebrew manuscripts of his day and sold it to the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, where the codex has been since 1863. He also, as an account in Bible Review puts it, was "a bit of a scoundrel": "Some manuscripts in it are forgeries, and others contain forged emendations and interpolations—part of Firkovich's effort to establish the early settlement of the Karaites in the Crimea." The same account is careful about the scope — "the forgeries constitute a small and identifiable part of the gigantic collection" — and no source consulted here alleges that this codex's colophons are among them. What Firkovich never explained is where he got it: "neither in his autobiography... nor in his extant letters does he tell us where, when or under what circumstances he acquired the Leningrad Codex; he does not even discuss this codex." The city's name changed back to St Petersburg in 1991; the National Library of Russia asked that the manuscript keep the name scholarship knows it by.

Is It Really a Ben Asher Bible?

The claim attached to this codex is that it was copied from manuscripts of Aaron ben Asher, the Masorete of the Aleppo Codex, and so preserves that tradition at one remove. It is a claim about a copy's parentage, and it can be tested against the manuscript's own masorah — the marginal notes that state how a word should be spelled. M. Breuer ran the test and reported the result bluntly. He wrote in Hebrew, and the English here is K. Phillips's: "In the text of the Prophets in the Leningrad Codex there are more than 250 places in which the orthography stands in opposition to the Tiberian Masorah... Kahle's claim that the Leningrad Codex is 'ben Asher's text', is an injustice to b. Asher. Dotan's claim, that the Leningrad Codex matches b. Asher's tradition, is simply incomprehensible." A manuscript that contradicts its own apparatus in hundreds of places is not a clean copy of anything. M. Goshen-Gottstein's suggestion was that an existing text not following ben Asher's rules had been heavily corrected to conform to them, which would explain both the alterations visible on the page and the residue of disagreement.

None of that makes it a bad Bible, and it is important to say what the criticism is and is not. In its vocalisation and accents the codex is reckoned the best witness to the ben Asher tradition after the Aleppo Codex itself, which is precisely why it was worth arguing about. What it is not is a photograph of a lost original — and the modern editions built on it inherit that. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia reproduces this manuscript diplomatically, errors included: its editors say they "accordingly refrained from removing obvious scribal errors," recording them in the apparatus instead. There is a live argument about whether that is the right way to edit the Hebrew Bible at all. R. Hendel's Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition takes the other road, printing "the best readings according to the judgment of the editor" rather than reproducing one manuscript, and aiming at the archetype behind the surviving copies — with his own caveat attached: "This is not identical to the original text." A reader who opens an English Old Testament is standing at the end of that argument, whichever side of it they have never heard of.

Scripture references

• Daniel 7:8 — The little horn of Daniel's vision. An eleventh-century Jewish scribe in Egypt borrowed the phrase, disparagingly, as a name for the Islamic era, and used it to date his own manuscript. The World English Bible renders the phrase "another horn, a little one"
• Genesis 1:1 — The first verse of the manuscript that stands behind most modern Old Testaments
• Deuteronomy 32:1-4 — The Song of Moses, one of the places where the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible visibly differ

Sources

• ScholarshipB. Outhwaite, "Beyond the Leningrad Codex: Samuel b. Jacob in the Cairo Genizah" — Ben Outhwaite, Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library · Read in full through Cambridge's institutional repository. Source for the scribe's two colophon statements, for the 491 leaves and the 120 sheep, for "a remarkable piece of solo entrepreneurship", for the full translation of the ownership colophon and its five dating systems, for the correction of Cairo to Fustat, for the Daniel 7:8 epithet, for the 1008-1009 conclusion, for the Karaite patron — including his own hedge, "strongly suggests", and the Goitein-Bareket disagreement he reports, both of which section one now carries — for the 1021 copying contract and its twenty-five dinars, and for the list of modern editions built on the manuscript. The repository copy carries no journal or volume, so no formal place of publication is claimed for it hereSupports: The scribe, the colophon, the date, the place of writing, and the codex's role in modern editions
• ReferenceJ. A. Sanders and A. B. Beck, "The Leningrad Codex" — James A. Sanders and Astrid B. Beck, Bible Review (Biblical Archaeology Society), 1997 · Read in full through a mirrored copy. Popular-scholarly rather than peer-reviewed, but written by participants: Beck and Sanders were involved in the 1990 photographic expedition that produced the facsimile, and Sanders sat on the Biblia Hebraica Quinta committee. Source for the 982 photographed pages (491 leaves), the sixteen carpet pages, the five dating systems and their own preferred range of 1008-1010, the Kahle-in-Aleppo story and why Biblia Hebraica ended up using this manuscript, and the passage on Firkovich quoted in section twoSupports: Why this codex rather than the Aleppo Codex became the standard, and the Firkovich provenance problem
• ScholarshipP. Sanders, review of M. Friedman, The Aleppo Codex — Paul Sanders, Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam · Review of Biblical Literature 04/2015, published by the Society of Biblical Literature; read in full. Cited on this record for one sentence, which section two quotes: "During the last decades before 1947, even rabbis or scholars with a good reputation were hardly ever allowed to consult it, because the holders feared that it might be stolen or damaged." He is describing the whole period rather than P. Kahle's particular rebuff, and the book he is reviewing is about the Aleppo Codex rather than this one. He is not the J. A. Sanders of the Bible Review article also cited here; the two are unrelated and this article distinguishes them by initial throughout, because a bare "Sanders" sends a reader checking the quotation to the wrong manSupports: Why the Aleppo Codex was closed to scholars in the decades before 1947, in the words of the scholar who wrote the sentence
• ScholarshipK. Phillips, "A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex: L17" — Kim Phillips, Cambridge University Library · Tyndale Bulletin 68:1 (2017), 1-29; peer-reviewed, open access, and read in full. The source of M. Breuer's judgement quoted in section three. The judgement is Breuer's own, from his Keter Aram Tsova (1976), p. 6 — Phillips's footnote 58 gives the page — but Breuer wrote in Hebrew and the English is Phillips's rendering of him, unmarked as a translation there and marked as one hereSupports: The test of the ben Asher claim against the codex's own masorah
• Primary textThe Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex — The Westminster Leningrad Codex project, derived from the Groves Center's WLC 4.20 · A transcription of the manuscript itself, pointing and accents included. Its own licence page states that "All biblical Hebrew text, in any format, may be viewed or copied without restriction". Confirmed liveSupports: That the text behind modern Old Testament translations can be inspected directly
• Holding institutionWest Semitic Research, colour photographs of the Leningrad Codex, deposited on the Internet Archive — Photographs by Bruce E. Zuckerman for the West Semitic Research Project; National Library of Russia, MS Evr. I B19a · The descendant of the 1990 expedition to Leningrad described in the Sanders and Beck article. Deposited under a Public Domain Mark, which is what makes it linkable here. The National Library of Russia's own catalogue could not be reached from here — its site returned no response on two attempts — so the shelfmark in this article's facts block rests on scholarly attestation rather than on the library's own recordSupports: A free facsimile of the manuscript, and the limits of what the holding library could confirm
• ScholarshipR. Hendel, "A New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible" — Ronald Hendel, University of California, Berkeley · His own bylined account of the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition project, August 2014, read in full. The definitions quoted in section three are his: a critical text "contains the best readings according to the judgment of the editor", the project aims at the archetype, and "This is not identical to the original text" is his own qualification, not a critic'sSupports: The eclectic alternative to a diplomatic edition, stated by its own editor
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Leningrad Codex

Further reading

• B. Outhwaite, "Beyond the Leningrad Codex: Samuel b. Jacob in the Cairo Genizah" (Cambridge)
• The Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex
• Wikipedia: Leningrad Codex

Reflect

One scribe wrote every letter of this Bible, pointed it, checked it and signed it. What is the largest thing you have ever finished alone?