![]() ![]() It later migrated east to the town of Makisin in what's today northeast Syria, where it was dedicated to a synagogue in the 13th century. How the Sassoon Codex survived the ages is an epic in its own right.Ī note on the manuscript attest to its owners in centuries past: A man named Khalaf ben Abraham gave it to Isaac ben Ezekiel al-Attar, who gave it to his sons Ezekiel and Maimon. These venerable manuscripts were protected and treasured by Syrian Jewish communities for centuries until the 20th century. “But because it’s missing (a third of its pages), in those parts that are absent, there is great significance to this manuscript.” The Codex Sassoon's 792 pages make up around 92% of the Hebrew Bible. “The Aleppo Codex is more precise than the Sassoon Codex, there’s no doubt,” Ofer said. The Codex Sassoon’s margins contain an annotation from a later scholar who says he checked its text against the Aleppo Codex - referring to the manuscript by the Arabic title a-Taj, “the Crown.” The Aleppo Codex, dated to around 930, has been considered the gold standard of the Masoretic Bibles for around 1,000 years. He said the scribal quality was “surprisingly sloppy” compared to its counterpart. “Any Masoretic scholar in their right mind would take the Aleppo Codex over the Sassoon Codex, without any regret or hesitation,” said Kim Phillips, a Bible expert at the Cambridge University Library. Though it's certainly ancient and rare, scholars say the Codex Sassoon doesn't match the pedigree and quality of its contemporary - the Aleppo Codex. “It’s so foundational not only for Judaism, but also for world culture.” “It’s like the emergence of the biblical text as we know it today,” Mintz said. The codex’s writing style suggests its creator was an unspecified early 10th-century scribe in Egypt or the Levant. Sharon Liberman Mintz, a senior Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s, said that radiocarbon dating of the parchment gave an estimated date of 880 to 960. Precisely where and when the Codex Sassoon was made remains uncertain. Unlike Torah scrolls, where the Hebrew letters are devoid of vowels and punctuation, these manuscripts contained extensive annotation instructing readers how to recite the words correctly. Starting a few centuries before the Codex Sassoon’s creation, Jewish scholars known as Masoretes started codifying oral traditions of how to properly spell, pronounce, punctuate and chant the words of Judaism's holiest book. Only the Dead Sea Scrolls and a handful of fragmentary early medieval texts are older, and “an entire Hebrew Bible is relatively rare,” he said. “There are three ancient Hebrew Bibles from this period," said Yosef Ofer, a professor of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar Ilan University: the Codex Sassoon and Aleppo Codex from the 10th century, and the Leningrad Codex, from the early 11th century. ![]()
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