The Aleppo and Leningrad codices
The Hebrew text used today descends from copies whose scribes counted letters and verses in the margins to keep it fixed — and those copies can be compared against Qumran a thousand years earlier.
Named outside the BibleManuscriptAD 930 and 1008
The two great Masoretic Bibles. The Leningrad Codex of 1008 is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible and underlies most printed Hebrew Bibles today. The Aleppo Codex is older and finer, but about a third of it was lost after riots in 1947. Both carry the Masoretes' vowel points, accents and marginal counts — a system built to stop copyists drifting.
The complete Hebrew Bible with vocalisation, accents and Masoretic notes.
- Found
- Tiberias, then Aleppo and Cairo
- Now held at
- Shrine of the Book, Jerusalem (Aleppo); National Library of Russia, St Petersburg (Leningrad)
- Language
- Hebrew
- How it reached us
- Never buried — copied by hand, generation after generation, until printing.
What it shows
The Aleppo Codex is now incomplete, with most of the Torah missing.
How historians use it
The base text of every scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible.
In Scripture
Sources
- Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (2012)
These summaries are written in English for now. Translations follow.