Page 28 - Yahwehs Book

[Source: How We Got the Bible, Neil R. Lightfoot]

You may wonder why I would write about Scribes that created copies of the Hebrew Scriptures as
recently as the tenth century A.D.. The reason is that these copies that the Masoretes made are the
oldest existing copies of the Hebrew Scriptures known today. (The Dead Sea Scrolls are much older,
but they contain primarily fragments of the Hebrew Bible.) There are actually much older copies of
the Old Testament in languages other than Hebrew, such as the Greek Septuagint, but these are not
valued as highly because they are a translation, and not the original language of the Old Testament.

You may well ask, “What happened to the older Hebrew manuscripts, for they first began to be
recorded as far back as 1,500 B.C.?” This means that there are no existing manuscripts for the first
2,500 years of the Hebrew Scriptures. Neil R. Lightfoot provides the answer for us.

The Jewish scribes looked upon their copies of the Scriptures with an almost superstitious respect.
This led them to give ceremonial burial to any of the texts that were damaged or defective. Their
motive was to prevent the improper use of the material on which the sacred name of God had been
inscribed. Before burial, however, faulty manuscripts were hidden away in a “ginizah” (from
Aramaic genaz, to hide), a kind of storeroom for manuscripts that were unusable. But however noble
the intentions, the replacement of older copies with newer ones, and the burial of those discarded,
have deprived us of early Hebrew manuscripts.
[Source: Ibid]

The modern Hebrew Bible (Old Testament only) is based upon the Masoretic text of the Scriptures.
Following is a list of five of the most important Hebrew manuscripts.

1. The Aleppo Codex. First in rank among the Hebrew manuscripts, the Aleppo Codex derives its
name from the city in Syria where it had long been located. A beautifully written codex of the entire
Hebrew Bible, it was finished sometime in the tenth century. Unfortunately, it is no longer complete;
large sections of it were destroyed in Arab riots against the Jews...

Arab mobs, looting and burning and killing, destroyed all the synagogues in Aleppo, including the
1,500 year old Mustaribah Synagogue. Found in the ashes of this synagogue was the prized Aleppo
Codex. A quarter of the manuscript had been destroyed - almost all of the Pentateuch and all of a
number of other books as well. Smuggled out of Syria to Jerusalem, it is now being used as the base
of a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible to be published by Hebrew University.

2. The Leningrad Codex. Of equal rank with the Aleppo Codex is the Leningrad Codex. Now the
oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, it was written in Cairo about the year 1010. It, too,
is a beautiful manuscript, with pages ornately wrought.

The manuscript today is in the National Library of St. Petersburg, Russia. Although the city’s name
is once again St. Petersburg, the manuscript is still known as the Leningrad Codex... It is the
Leningrad Codex that mainly underlies most editions of the modern Hebrew Bible...

3. The Cairo Codex. This manuscript of the Former and Latter Prophets was written by Moses ben