Aleppo Codex
he
The Aleppo Codex is one of the most important Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible, written in the tenth century. Maimonides used it as his reference for the authoritative text, and many scholars regard it as the most accurate witness to the Masoretic tradition that survives.
History
The codex was written in Tiberias around AD 930. The consonantal text was copied by the scribe Shlomo ben Buya'a, and the vowel points, accents and Masoretic notes were added by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last and greatest master of the Ben Asher school, whose system became the standard for the Hebrew Bible.
The manuscript passed to the Karaite community of Jerusalem, was seized during the First Crusade, was ransomed in Egypt — where Maimonides consulted it while writing the Mishneh Torah — and by the fourteenth century had reached Aleppo in Syria, where it remained for some six hundred years, guarded by the Jewish community.
In the anti-Jewish riots of December 1947 the synagogue that housed it was burned. The codex survived, but roughly a third of it — including almost the whole Pentateuch — was lost and has never been recovered. What remained was brought secretly to Israel in 1958 and is now held by the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem.
Importance
Maimonides declared the codex the authority for the writing of Torah scrolls, and that ruling gave it a standing no other manuscript has held in Jewish law. For textual scholarship its value lies in the precision of its Masoretic apparatus: its vocalisation and accentuation are the most consistent known, and where it survives it is the preferred witness to the Ben Asher text.
Because of its losses, however, the printed critical editions — the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and its successors — are based on the complete Leningrad Codex instead. The Hebrew University Bible Project and the Israeli editions known as Keter Aram Tsova follow the Aleppo Codex where it is extant.
Contemporary Relevance
The Aleppo Codex remains a central object of study in textual criticism and in the history of the Hebrew Bible, and the fate of its missing leaves is still an open question. High-resolution images of the surviving folios are now published online, which has put a manuscript once guarded behind locked doors within reach of any reader.