Hebrew Voices #158 – Sassoon Codex Under a Microscope

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Nehemia: This is space age technology; I can't believe this is real! That we're able to do these tests that scholars, not just in previous generations… scholars in this generation couldn't have dreamed of doing this type of test, and now we're doing them. It's absolutely amazing stuff!

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I'm here today with Nelson Calvillo of the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, and we are going to be discussing the Sassoon Codex. I'm excited, Nelson!

Nelson: Shalom, Nehemia. I am super excited! Thank you so much for having me on to discuss this amazing manuscript.

Nehemia: So, why don't you start by introducing to the audience what the Sassoon Codex is.

Nelson: Okay. So, the Sassoon Codex is a manuscript that Nehemia has talked about quite a bit in the past. Nehemia, whenever you talk about Masoretic manuscripts you mention what are called “the Big Six”, the most important six manuscripts of the Masoretic tradition and of the Hebrew Bible. And Codex Sassoon, which is also referred to in scholarship as Sassoon 1053, is one of the earliest extant biblical manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and of the Masoretic tradition. It’s within the same realm of the famous Aleppo Codex.

Nehemia: And actually, there's a reference to a manuscript that's called… about a thousand years ago, eight, nine hundred years ago, it's referred to as “The Brother of the Crown” in one of the documents from the Cairo Genizah. And there's a theory that Sassoon 1053, or the Sassoon Codex, is the Brother of the Crown. One of the things that seems to point to that is… at the very least we can say that the scribe that wrote notes in some of the margins of the Sassoon Codex used the Aleppo Codex. The Aleppo Codex in its day was considered the most accurate copy of the Bible. It was completed around the year 925 in Tiberias by the master scribe Aaron Ben Asher, and in the Sassoon Codex… I'm going to pull this up here on the screen…

Actually, before we get to that, I had the opportunity in 2019 to examine the Sassoon Codex myself. I spent four days there with Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar Ilan University and Dr. Neriah Klein of the Hebrew University Bible Project. This is a miracle for me because I had been looking for this codex for years.

So, you mentioned the Big Six. The Big Six were defined by Rabbi Mordecai Breuer, who is actually a winner of the Israel Prize. That's like the Jewish world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, issued by the State of Israel, and he was one of the greatest scholars of the Masoretic text. He spent years of his life studying the Aleppo Codex, and the problem is that part of the Aleppo Codex is missing. So, the question is, how do you fill in the missing parts? And then also sometimes there's mistakes in the Aleppo Codex. What do you do when there's a mistake? How do you know it's a mistake?

So, what Mordecai Breuer and other scholars like Israel Yevin did is they compared the Aleppo Codex to manuscripts that were close to the Aleppo Codex; that were similar to the Aleppo Codex. They were from the same tradition as the Aleppo Codex, you could say.

And Breuer specifically defined the Big Six. Those are the Leningrad Codex… the Leningrad Codex is the basis of a lot of printings today because it's complete. The BHS, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia is based on that; that’s the Bible used in every seminary and university in the world, the printed Hebrew Bible. You’ve got the Aleppo Codex, of course, this Sassoon Codex, the Damascus Crown, the British Library Oriental 4445 and the Cairo Codex of the Prophets; those are the Big Six.

There are other ones. The other ones tend to be fragmentary; they tend to be parts of manuscripts, whereas these six are more or less complete. They're not completely complete; the Aleppo is missing about a third of it, but it's so important because it was proofread by Aaron Ben Asher.

So, for years I was trying to get my hands on the Sassoon Codex. And I had read in a book by a scholar at the National Library of Israel, in a little note at the end of the book he mentions that Sassoon 1053 is in the hands of somebody named Jack Safra. I don’t know who that is, had no idea who he was. I found out he's a banker in Switzerland. Every time after that I would meet a banker or anybody who's a millionaire or more, I would say, “Hey, do you know Jack Safra?” No, never heard of him.

Okay, somehow they got to go to the same cocktail parties. Somehow, I’ve got to find this guy. For years literally I would meet people and say, “Oh, you have a company. You're involved in banking. Do you know this person?” Nobody knew him.

Then out of the blue I get an email from Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar Ilan University, who I was doing my PhD dissertation with, and he tells me that he's going to Geneva to examine Sassoon 1053, the Sassoon Codex. Do I want to come with? And absolutely, I want to go with! And I want to share a photo here. It's a beautiful thing here, this is me in Geneva with the Sassoon Codex. This is really at the end of the four days when we did our photo op at the end of the four days. And there it is!

Nelson: Wow!

Nehemia: That's the Sassoon Codex, and it really is an amazing thing because there aren't that many… it's not complete; it's missing some pages. By the way, there's a beautiful description of this codex and discussion about it on Sotheby's website. It's about to be sold at Sotheby's; that's why we were discussing it right now. They're asking 30 million dollars and up; they expect it might go for 50. Who knows, maybe people will be watching this years from now and say, “Oh, that was the codex that never sold.” Or, “That was the codex that sold for a 100 million dollars.” I have no idea.

But one of the things that's really special about it is it was originally a complete Bible.

So, I mentioned the Damascus Crown is one of the Big Six; the Damascus Crown was only ever the Torah.

Nelson: Okay.

Nehemia: Oriental 4445 was only ever the Torah. The Aleppo Codex was originally a complete Bible, but about a third of it’s missing. You have the Leningrad Codex that’s complete, but it was written about 100 years after this codex, maybe 50 years, it’s not so clear. The Leningrad Codex is extremely important, but of the Big Six, only three of them were ever complete Tanakhs, complete Hebrew Bibles - Leningrad, Aleppo, and this one, Sassoon 1053. The Cairo Codex of the Prophets is only the Prophets.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: Hence the name. So that in itself makes it extremely important. Another thing that makes it really important… So, you have these proofreading notes all over these manuscripts… Oh, before we get to that, there's so many things I want to talk about here!

So, one of the things I did while I was examining this with Professor Ofer and his assistant, Neriah Klein, I brought my Dino-Lite, that is the microscope, and here is a photograph of God’s name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and it has the full vowels, Shva, Cholam, Kamatz. And I wanted to verify that’s really a Cholam, that it really is an “O” and it's not just a… I had a professor once who said, “Maybe there was a fly, and they swatted the fly. That's not actually ink.” Well, now we can tell!

So, this is one of the reasons I wanted to see the manuscript for myself. What we had were these black and white photos, and you really couldn't tell, “Is that just a speck from the photocopy machine?” So, here's what they did. They photographed it in black and white and they produced a microfilm at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts. Then someone printed out, using literally a sort of Xerox machine, they printed out the pages from the… So, they had the microfilm, and then they printed out the images from the microfilm, and then somebody scanned those images. So, there had been layers and layers of degradation. The photocopy machine on the drum has dirt and stuff, and it's hard to tell, “Is that actually a vowel or is it dirt?”

Nelson: A speck of dirt.

Nehemia: Exactly. How can you tell? Well, here we have a microscope image taken with what’s called a Dino-Lite. It’s at about 50x magnification, actually probably closer to 42x. And you can see this is actually ink; there's cracks in the ink! You can see that it's ink! And then here's another thing that you would never know from the black and white images; that this manuscript was re-inked. Meaning, as the ink would flake off they would trace over the ink. And so, for example, you see here this letter Hey. So, you see two different contours to the Hey. You see the original one underneath and then you see the re-inker drew over that letter and covered over most of it. You can see that particularly in the Vav; here's the original line underneath, and then the re-inker had more of a curvy Vav. The vowels haven't been re-inked; the vowels are original. You can see here the Cholam of Yehovah.

And the beautiful thing about the Dino-lite is that it has visible light, ultraviolet, and infrared. This is what it looks like in ultraviolet. Why is this important? Because first of all, you can see the ink of the re-inker looks different than the original ink.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: It's a little bit darker in the infrared; it has a slightly different chemical and elemental composition. We know it's what's called iron gall ink. There's two main types of ink, iron gall and carbon ink; carbon ink looks completely different in infrared. And then here's an ultraviolet image. Ultraviolet doesn’t really add much in this case.

So, that's one of the things I was able to do is take these microscope images and verify that we're actually looking at ink here and determine at least whether it is the original ink of the vowels. Now, it's possible that somebody came along 500 years later and added that dot, but it wasn't the re-inker. That's what we can say, right?

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: In order to determine whether that actually is the original ink or not, I would need to use an x-ray device, which I didn't have access to. Hopefully in the future, God willing, I'll be able to do that, but for now we could say it wasn't done by the re-inker and there indeed is a Cholam there in the name Yehovah.

Nelson: Wow! Can I ask you a question?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: You said you were checking specifically for that dot, the Cholam. Why didn’t you also check the other two vowels, the Shva and the Kamatz?

Nehemia: So, virtually every instance of God’s name has the Shva and the Kamatz. What’s missing in most instances is the Cholam, and there aren’t a lot of places in the Sassoon 1053, the Sassoon Codex, where it has that Cholam, the one that my friend Keith famously calls “The Cholam from Heaven.” “The ‘Holam’ from heaven!”

Nelson: Wow! So Nehemia, you go from asking people, “Hey, do you happen to know the owner of this manuscript?” To actually now, you have touched it, you have studied it, you have looked at it through a microscope.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: What does that feel like?

Nehemia: It's incredible, Nelson. It really was an incredible experience. It also opened the door for other things. Once I had examined this manuscript with a microscope, I was then able to go to people and say, “Okay. I've examined the Leningrad Codex with a microscope, and Sassoon 1053 with a microscope. I'd now like to examine the Damascus Crown with a microscope.” I was able to do that.

I got those three down, now I want to see the Aleppo Codex with a microscope, and I was able to do that. They see you’re not just some bozo off the street, but you have experience handling these priceless manuscripts, these invaluable manuscripts, and they’re like, “Okay, you must know what you're doing.”

I want to share something else that I was able to do, and this wasn't really expected. It was kind of on the fly I came up with this idea. So, one of the things that Professor Ofer was studying was the Masoretic notes. They’re these proofreading notes throughout the manuscript. Some are between the columns and others are in the upper and lower margin. Now, what happened was that over time, the manuscript, the pages, started to be damaged, and they took strips of parchment to reinforce the manuscript. And some of those strips of parchment that reinforce the upper and bottom margins, particularly the bottom margin, covered over some of these notes.

So let me show you what I'm talking about. This is from page 291, and… let me get this out of the way here. This is page 291 and we have here a strip of parchment that we believe was added in the 12th century. You can see some writing down here right at the bottom.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: But what about the writing that’s behind this strip of parchment? Oh, well, you can't see it. So, I said, “Why don't we shine a light behind the back of it?” And then all of a sudden you can read it!

Nelson: Wow! Look at that!

Nehemia: Yeah, isn’t that cool?

Nelson: That is amazing!

Nehemia: Yeah. And then you take a photograph and then you can read it. So, this is covered with parchment, but we can read it with the backlight, which is pretty cool.

Nelson: And this is important because that text, that you otherwise would not be able to see, that is part of the Masoretic notes, right?

Nehemia: Absolutely. These are proofreading notes that were written in order to make sure the text was copied perfectly, and if there were mistakes in it you could then correct those mistakes. And I’m not going to go into all the details. This really is a beautiful description of how they work. In the Sotheby’s catalog… they have an article online that we’ll link to which has a really good explanation. It was largely based on work by Yosef Ofer who wrote a very important book, The Masora on Scripture and its Methods, and he wrote a report for Sotheby’s describing it.

One of his big discoveries, of Professor Ofer, was that there were two Masoretes. There’s an original Masorete, who wrote notes in the manuscript, and another one came along, erased some of the notes of the first Masorete, and then wrote over the erased sections. And this was why they needed to reinforce the parchment. When they erased it, they damaged the parchment, and so they wrote these new notes over the erasure. And sometimes that bottom and top margin would fall off because the erasing wasn’t with a rubber eraser at the back of a pencil; they took a razor and scraped off ink. And that actually damaged the parchment. That’s why they needed to reinforce it.

Nelson: Wow.

Nehemia: So, the very notes that you wanted to check are the ones that are on the damaged parchment; that's what they're doing there. Now, Ofer’s discovery is that there were two different Masoretes, and this is a really cool thing. So, the second Masorete, we know, used the Aleppo Codex. And how do we know that? And this is, I think, one of the most significant things about the Sassoon Codex, is that there are parts of it that are based on the Aleppo Codex. And why is that important? Because, like we said, about a third of the Aleppo Codex is missing. So, it is essentially a witness to the Aleppo Codex, particularly the notes of the second Masorete.

Nelson: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, on page 112 of the Codex in the upper margin there are notes written by the second Masorete, and he has a list of words that are spelled in an unusual way. That's what these lists of notes are; they’re lists of different words that are spelled in special ways, in unusual ways, and the purpose is that when you come to copy it, you don't say, “Oh, that's spelled wrong,” and you correct it because you say, “Yeah, it's part of the list. I know it's supposed to be spelled weird in that place.”

All right. So, here's what he writes, “U’matzanu otam be’ma’aseh ha’melamed ha’gadol Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher be’ma’asav be’machzor ha’mechuneh be’altaj.” “And we found them in the work of the great teacher,” this list that he's just quoted, “in the work of the great teacher Aaron the son of Moshe the son of Asher, in his,” literally, “in his deeds” but meaning in the things that he wrote, “in the machzor,” machzor is a word that means “a codex”.

Nelson: Okay.

Nehemia: A manuscript. Later it means something else, but here that’s what it means, “which is called altaj,” “the crown”. Now, what does that have to do with the Aleppo Codex? The Aleppo Codex today is called in Hebrew, Keter Aram Tzova, “The Aleppo Crown.” Aram Tzova is actually the biblical name for the Syrian city of Aleppo. So, it's called “The Aleppo Crown.” And so, the manuscript, or in the codex, is called Altaj, which is Arabic for “the crown”. So, there's a manuscript called Altaj, and it's the work of Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher, particularly the notes are, and that has to be the Aleppo Codex.

And so, this is actually… well it depends on when this was written. That's where things get a bit complicated. They did a Carbon-14 test. The Carbon-14 test said it could be the late 800’s or early to mid-900’s. Now, Aaron ben Asher lived in the beginning of the 900’s, and we believe that he completed the Aleppo Codex around the year 925. It could have been 10 or 20 years earlier or later; we don’t know for sure. The reason we think it was 925 is that there's a codex in the Russian National Library in St Petersburg called Evr. II B 17, that's the shelf mark. By the way, I examined that one as well when I was in St Petersburg in 2019. And Evr. II B 17 has a colophon. Meaning, it has like a title page, but it’s written at the end, and it says when the manuscript was completed. And it was completed in the year 929.

Now, it wasn't written by Aaron ben Asher, Evr. II B 17, it was written by Shlomo ben Buya’a and his brother, Ephrayim ben Buya’a. Okay, who are those guys? Well, Shlomo ben Buya’a was a scribe who actually wrote the consonants of the Aleppo Codex.

Nelson: Okay.

Nehemia: So, these manuscripts have consonants and vowels. Let’s pull up a page here from the Aleppo Codex to show you what I’m talking about. Here we go, Aleppo Codex and on some random page. So, what do we have here? If you zoom in here, we've got consonants, like this says, “Be’kirbechem ve’horesh yorish mif’neichem.” So, there’s the letters Bet-Quf-Resh-Bet-Kaf-Mem, there’s also the vowels below, above, and inside the letters. Then here’s an accent called an etnachta, and then here are notes between the margins, those are called the Masora Parva, “the small Masorah”, and there’s also the Masora Magna, which is notes at the top and the bottom.

So, Aaron ben Asher didn’t write the consonants; he wrote the vowels, the accents, the Masora Parva, “the small Masora,” and the Masora Magna, “the large Masora”. And then he proofread it.

Oh! This is a beautiful example! Here’s actually an example that’s in my PhD dissertation; this is serendipitous. So, here it says… you see there’s a word here that’s erased, the word “ha’brit”, or sorry, “ha’brit” is written over the erasure.

Nelson: It looks smudged.

Nehemia: Well, it looks smudged, but that’s because it’s written over an erasure. And the way you erase is you take a razor, and you scratch it off. Now what was erased here? We don't know, it's been erased. But Israel Yevin, who studied the Aleppo Codex… and he studied the actual codex, not just the photos; for years, he suggested that the word that was erased here was Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nelson: The name of God?

Nehemia: The name of God. And why is that? Because the normal phrase is “Aron Yehovah”, “the Ark of the LORD”, not, “the Ark of the Covenant”, that's a common phrase. And then we have a theological problem in this verse. So, where is this verse, Nelson? “Hineh aron ha’brit,” let’s pull it up here…

Okay, so wait, hold on a second. Okay, so we have here Joshua 3 verse 11. So, Joshua 3:11 says, “Behold the Ark of the Covenant, the Lord of all the Earth passes before you through the Jordan.” So, the Ark of the Covenant is the Lord of all the Earth? No, of course not, it’s “the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of all the Earth.” But somebody could read this as, “the Ark of the covenant, the Lord of all the Earth,” meaning the Ark is the Lord.

Nelson: I see.

Nehemia: So, it’s a theological problem, or it could be perceived as a theological problem. So, if it said, “the Ark of Yehovah, the Lord of all the Earth,” well there’s no theological problem there whatsoever, and “Ark of Yehovah” is a common phrase.

Let’s look for “aron Yehovah”. Here we have it two verses later. It has “Those who carry the Ark of Yehovah, the Lord of all the Earth.” So, it’s not that the Ark is the Lord of all the Earth, Yehovah is the Lord of all the Earth. So it's possible, or it seems that, I should say, according to Israel Yevin, the scribe, who would have been Shlomo ben Buya’a, originally wrote, “Behold the Ark of Yehovah, the Lord of all the Earth,” and then in the proofreading process either Aaron ben Asher or Shlomo ben Buya’a, here it’s hard to tell, scratched off the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey and wrote the correct “of the Covenant” rather than “Yehovah”.

And by the way, here is the exact phrase, “The Ark of Yehovah, the Lord of all the Earth,” a few lines down. And this was a theological… meaning, on some subconscious level, the mistake could be that he was uncomfortable with the phrase “the Ark of the Covenant, the Lord of all the Earth”, and so he put in Yehovah. Or maybe he had a manuscript that said that.

Nelson: Yes. Because presumably there was a manuscript next to the Aleppo Codex that they were copying from.

Nehemia: Right. So that’s an interesting point. So, Shlomo ben Buya’a copied from whatever source he copied. In a lot of instances Aaron ben Asher came along and erased what Shlomo ben Buya’a wrote and fixed it. And by “fixed it”, I mean he changed it. Because he had a different, I believe, and I think it could be demonstrated, that Aaron ben Asher had a different idea of what the text… Well, obviously he had a different idea of what it was supposed to say, because he changed it, but I think he had a different manuscript that he was basing himself on.

So, in essence, Shlomo ben Buya’a was a contractor; we’d call him a subcontractor, who came along and wrote the consonants, and Aaron ben Asher came along and wrote the vowels, the accents, the large Masora and the small Masora, and he proofread it and made corrections to the consonantal text.

Why is this all important? Because we know what Shlomo ben Buya’a was doing in the year 929; he was writing what later became Evr. II B 17, and so he wasn’t available in the year 929 to be working on the Aleppo Codex. So, he did it either a few years before or a few years after. And look, it could have been 20 years before or 20 years after, we don’t really know. We say 925, that’s kind of a guess.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: A guess based on what I’ve just presented, but it could be 20 years before or 20 years after. You could see a podcast that Nehemia did in the year 2023, and say, “Ah, so this other thing, Nehemia must have done five years earlier, or maybe it was 20.” I’ve been doing stuff since the 90’s, that’s a long time. Isn’t that crazy, Nelson? That the 90’s is… well I don’t know if you remember the 90’s, I do. I probably still have socks from the 90’s! I definitely have a sweater from the 90’s!

What blows my mind is that I remember things from the 70’s that are farther away from today than the Holocaust was from the things that I remember in the 70’s.

Nelson: Isn’t that amazing!

Nehemia: That's mind-blowing!

Nelson: Can I say something real quickly?

Nehemia: Yeah, go ahead, please.

Nelson: I just want to make a point, and I think it’s important for our audience. When you don't have explicit dates in these manuscripts, having to cross reference these names and these owners of the people who are sometimes, not always, but sometimes mentioned in these manuscripts…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: …that’s what makes it such a daunting task of trying to pinpoint, or at least get closer to pinpointing, exactly when a manuscript was copied or sold. So, it's not an exact science, but we get to show the audience the work that goes into it.

Nehemia: Right. By the way, we were talking about this thing where it says, “Behold the Ark of the Covenant, the Lord of all the Earth,” and we said he erased Yehovah; he, being either Aaron ben Asher or Shlomo ben Buya’a, I guess we don't really know. One of the things I was looking for was to see if we have any manuscripts where it actually says, “the Ark of Yehovah”.

Nelson: Wow.

Nehemia: We’re speculating that such a manuscript existed, and I’m looking here in Kennicott, who collated about 600 manuscripts that were available to him in Europe in the 1760’s and 70’s, and he doesn’t have any manuscript that has “the Ark of Yehovah”. He doesn’t have a single example of a manuscript like that.

Now, it doesn’t mean there were 600 manuscripts that preserved Joshua 3:11, which is the verse we're talking about. There might have been 50 manuscripts that preserved that one verse, I don’t know, because he didn’t tell us. And it's even more complicated than that. But no, we don't have any example of that, at least in Kennicott. Now I’m trying to remember if we have anything… Now I’m going to pull up my PhD dissertation and see, because I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I wrote. If there was an example that I knew about, I would have written it.

Let’s see, you know, I might not have brought that example. I think I might have buried that example in a footnote because I didn’t have room.

Nelson: Oh, no.

Nehemia: It was in my rough draft, whatever that’s worth. Now, let’s see if it’s in here.

Nelson: No, I think it shows that you had to make some hard decisions about what to leave on the cutting room floor.

Nehemia: Yeah. It’s kind of sad that I discovered all these things and couldn’t bring them all. And then I have people say, “Why didn’t you bring this? You’re trying to deceive us, Nehemia. Why didn’t you bring that other thing?” “I didn’t have room.”

So, no, that one didn’t make it in. I had five examples, and I was only able to bring three of the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey being erased. But I’m pretty sure I put that in a footnote somewhere; that’s where you bury the really interesting stuff when you run out of space.

Yeah, I don’t see it here. Oh wait, here it says, “Other examples of the Tetragrammaton being erased.” So here, I believe it’s in Footnote 160 on page 134 of my article in Textus. Yeah, Joshua 3:11, it’s in a footnote!

And I didn’t get to tell that whole story about how Yevin discovered this, and the whole thing of Yevin discovering it was in the late 70’s and the early 80’s. And he wrote out all of his notes by hand, and I spent a whole bunch of time poring over his notes, and that’s a great story in itself. I went there to prove that nobody ever changed a single accent or vowel of God’s name, and within about 15 minutes I was able to prove that not only did they change the accents and vowels in the Aleppo Codex, they actually erased the actual letters Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey themselves.

Now, I’m going to share something about the Sassoon Codex. And all of that background was to say that the Sassoon Codex couldn’t have been written before Aaron ben Asher because it mentions Aaron ben Asher. However, that’s in a note that was written by the second Masorete. Maybe that was added 100 or 200 years later, we don’t know. All we know is that the second Masorete had access to the Aleppo Codex.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: We don’t know when he did that. You can’t date ink. You can date parchment, and they did Carbon-14 tests, and the Carbon-14 tests said it was the late 800’s up to the mid-900’s. So, it could be anytime between 875 to 950 that this codex was written. Remember, the second Masorete erased the notes of the first Masorete and wrote his own notes. So, when did he do that? I don’t know; after the time of Aaron ben Asher, because he mentions Aaron ben Asher. Or it could have been during the time of Aaron ben Asher. He could have been Aaron ben Asher’s neighbor for all we know, we don’t really know. So, I want to show something really cool.

Nelson: Nehemia, if it’s alright, if I may, can I show the audience something really quick before you do that?

Nehemia: Sure. Oh, yeah!

Nelson: I would like to show them something. So, when you showed us that inscription in the top margin of the manuscript there, you were showing us a photo, right?

Nehemia: Hm-hm.

Nelson: Okay. Well, you recently established a new institute.

Nehemia: Yes.

Nelson: The IHBMR, the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. And what is so cool about the institute you established, and the website associated with it, is that people can actually go to the website of IHBMR at IHBMR.com and they can actually, for themselves, look at all of the pages of the Sassoon Manuscript. And so, if I may share my screen just for one second.

Nehemia: Please.

Nelson: At IHBMR.com, if you go to the tab that says “Manuscripts”, this is for our audience, you can actually see, as you can see on my screen, the Sassoon Manuscript, the manuscript that’s going to go for sale and be auctioned off next month by Sotheby’s auction house. And so here, you actually also have the manuscript indexed on the left side. Here are all of the references to every page.

So, the note you brought is referenced by Numbers, the page that has Numbers chapter 1 verses 10 to 41, and so if I zoom in up here on this page, and if I go to the bottom, it’s where you can actually see the page, you see page 112 there.

Nehemia: Oh, cool!

Nelson: And if I go to the top…

Nehemia: There we go!

Nelson: …there I can see for myself the note that you just showed our audience.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: With Aaron ben Moses ben Asher’s name there.

Nehemia: Yeah. Now, in my version there was a red thing around it that I drew. Yes, Nehemia has modified the images in Photoshop! Well, just to put a little circle around it, and that should be obvious.

Let’s look at Joshua 3:11, you’ve got it here.

Nelson: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: So, this was something that required a great deal of time, to go through every single page to determine where the beginning is and where the end is because there’s no chapter numbers, there’s no verse numbers. We’re working on making the website faster; be patient guys, it takes a little bit of time. There it is. So, this is Joshua 3:11, and we want to see if it has “aron ha’brit”, “the Ark of the Covenant”, or does it have “aron Yehovah”? There it is on the right… oh no, that’s the second instance, that’s a few verses later. There it is, “va’yis’u et aron ha’brit.” So, it has “the Ark of the Covenant”, which is what it has in pretty much every manuscript. But originally, the Aleppo Codex apparently, we think, had “aron Yehovah”, by mistake, or maybe on purpose, and it was changed.

Here it has “aron ha’brit.” Let’s see, which one is it? The phrase appears repeatedly, so it’s the one that says… now I lost my place… no, it’s right there, 3:11, “Hineh aron ha’brit adon kol ha’aretz,” there it is, you’ve got it there. So, that’s it, “Hineh aron ha’brit aron…” is that “aron” or “adon”? That’s “adon”. Well, that’s hard to tell actually! Wow! So, the Resh and Dalet are very similar. If you look in the next line, you have the word “Yarden” and the Dalet is what we call a “chupchik”, and the Resh is a little bit more rounded. But that first Resh, that is… wow! They’re similar, the Resh and the Dalet, that could be “aron kol ha’aretz.” It’s obviously meant to be “adon”, and I say obviously based on other manuscripts. That doesn’t mean this scribe intended that. Wow, that’s similar! So, if you go to the Dalet in “Yarden” just below it, can you show them the chupchik?

Nelson: There we go.

Nehemia: Chupchik is a little bump that distinguishes the Resh from the Dalet, but just to the right of that letter is a Resh, and boy, they’re similar! Wow, man! So, Kennicott has a manuscript where it says, “Aron kol ha’aretz”, “the Ark of all the Earth”.

Nelson: Oh, wow!

Nehemia: Yeah, one manuscript he mentions. One of the things about Kennicott is you always need to check to see if it actually is true, and we haven’t checked that, so take that with a grain of salt.

So yeah, the Institute of Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research is doing some exciting things, and we were given permission by the owner of this manuscript, Jacqui E. Safra, to publish these images and make them available. And it’s the first time they’ve ever been published with the verse numbers identified.

Nelson: This is phenomenal.

Nehemia: So that’s pretty cool how quickly we were able to find that, that’s very cool. That is awesome, Nelson.

I want to look at something else here, and now that you have it open, let’s see, what is this verse? Hold on, let’s find it on the website, “Gam ba’zeh lo bachar.” This is going to be 1 Samuel 16:8, 9 and 10.

Nelson: Okay, 1 Samuel.

Nehemia: 16. Oh that’s cool! There it is.

Nelson: We’re going to go here. This is page…

Nehemia: No, that’s the previous page… 16:8. So this goes up to 16 and 17 in the previous page. And it takes a little bit of time; we’re working on making it faster. These are big images. The National Library of Israel actually has these images online, but they don’t have them indexed by verse number, and I don’t think theirs is any faster than ours.

Alright, so, without zooming in, you can see at the bottom of the middle column there’s a little bit over two lines that have been erased. And what happened here is the scribe made a mistake. He copied an entire verse twice, and then he realized, “Okay, I’ve got to erase one of the instances of the verse, because the verse appears twice.” And he decided to erase the first one, but he left the top half of the letters so that there wouldn’t be an extra space in the text, because when there’s a space in the text, like for example you see on the third line of the second column there, there’s a space, that space means, “Hey, it’s the end of this idea, now it’s a new idea.” Those are called open and closed sections. He didn’t want to leave a section marker, a space in the manuscript, so he left the top of the letters. Why is that important? So, we know exactly what he erased because he copied the same verse twice, and one of the things he erased was something that’s not supposed to be erased. So, zoom in there on the bottom.

Nelson: Alright. We’re zooming in.

Nehemia: Actually, before you zoom in, go to the next column, and we can read what was erased. So, it said, “Shammah.” There… let me read it in English. Let me read the standard English translation here. What we have here is the JPS, so this is where God is choosing the King among the sons of Jesse.

Verse 7, “But the LORD said to Samuel,” this is JPS, “‘Pay no attention to his appearance or his stature, for I have rejected him,’” referring to one of David’s brothers. “‘For not as man sees does the LORD see; man sees only what is visible, but the LORD sees into the heart.’ Then Jesse called Abinadab and had him pass before Samuel; but he said, ‘The LORD has not chosen this one either.’ Next Jesse presented Shammah; and again, he said, ‘The LORD has not chosen this one either.’”

Alright, so it’s a series of brothers of David who are being presented. And here it says “Shammah”, that’s the name of the brother, that’s the first word of the column, “Va’yomer gam ba’zeh lo bachar Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.” “Also, this one Yehovah has not chosen.” Okay.

Now, that verse was copied twice, and if you go to the bottom of the previous column, we can see the first instance of the verse which was erased, but the tops were left, but we can still read it. The last word of the third to last column says, “Va’ya’aver,” “And he caused to pass over,” and then the next word there is “Yishai”, which is “Jesse.” How do I know it’s “Yishai”? Because I can see the top of the letters. “Shammah,” that’s the name of David’s brother, then “va’yomer,” “and he said,” “gam ba’zeh,” “also this,” next line begins “lo,” “he did not,” “bachar,” “he chose,” and the third word on the line that’s been erased is “Yud-Hey-Vav Hey”, Yehovah.

Nelson: Wow!

Nehemia: Now, why is that significant? Because the ancient rabbis established a rule… it’s in my PhD dissertation, but that’s not where they established it. The ancient rabbis… it’s in the Sifre, which is an ancient Midrash, and in a bunch of other sources, and it says that it is forbidden to erase a single letter of the name of God, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And here, not only did they erase a single letter, they erased the entire name, or at least the bottom half of the name.

Now, what does that tell us? That tells us beyond a shadow of a doubt that the scribe who corrected this manuscript was not a Rabbinical scribe, because no Rabbinical scribe would erase Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, not in this instance. There might be special instances, and I talk about this in my PhD dissertation, there could potentially be special instances where they would erase it. Not here. This had to be a Karaite scribe. It’s really inconceivable that a Rabbinical scribe would erase the name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey here. It was explicitly forbidden by what they considered to be a Torah prohibition.

Now, the Torah doesn’t actually say, “Don’t erase God’s name.” Where this whole thing comes from is that, in the ancient world they would write a name out and then they would erase it, and that was a curse. And we’re told, for example, “to blot out the name of Amalek”. What does it mean to blot out a name? It means to take a wet sponge and wipe off the ink. Now, why didn’t they take a sponge here? Why did they scratch it off? Because you can only really do that with carbon ink, and this is iron gall ink, and iron gall ink, if you take a sponge, you’re going to wipe off some of it, but I’ll still be able to read the letters. You’re going to leave an impression of the letters because it’s very difficult to erase iron gall ink. The way to erase iron gall ink is not with a wet sponge, it’s with a razor; you scratch it off, and you can see it’s been scratched off vigorously.

This is very interesting, because here we have, I think, pretty strong evidence that the scribe, or at the very least the proofreader, the corrector, was a Karaite scribe. And by the way, he erased a little bit more than he needed to. He erased the first two words of the verse the second time it appeared, “Va’ya’aver Yishai,” and then he had to rewrite those words. Now, why did he do that? I don’t know, it seems like a pretty bad mistake to make, but he did make it.

Now, what would be really interesting, and we would need a machine called an ArtTAX which does x-ray fluorescence, what we need to do is check the ink of “Va’ya’aver Yishai” using x-rays to see if it’s the same ink as all the other words on this page. And if it is, that means it’s very likely that the proofreader is the original scribe. Not necessarily, the same scribe could use two different inks, it happens all the time. But if it’s the same ink, that would point to the likelihood that we’re dealing with the same scribe. If it’s a different ink, then it very well could be a different scribe. The letters look the same, but the letters are kind of sloppy. I mean, it’s written over an erasure.

But this is really cool. Here we have incontrovertible evidence that Sassoon Codex was corrected by a Karaite scribe. That’s pretty cool. I think it’s cool.

Nelson: We can only find it out by the erasure that he made, the mistake, and the subsequent correction.

Nehemia: Right. Now, the mistake could have been made by a different one than the one who corrected it. First of all, it could have been corrected 400 years after the original mistake, we don’t know. That’s why it would be so amazing to check it using the x-ray technique, the XRF, the x-ray fluorescence. What would we check if we would look at this, we would look at the consonants, we would look at the vowels, we would look at the notes of the two Masoretes, Masorete one and Masorete two, and we would look at the Mesora Parva, that’s the small ones in between the columns, the small notes. And we might find five different inks. That doesn’t mean there’s five different scribes. One scribe, like I said, could use multiple inks, but if they’re all the same, that would suggest at the very least that it’s done in the same city at the same time in the same workshop. In the case of the two Masoretes, we know it’s two different scribes because they have different handwriting.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: So, this is a test that I would like to perform one day. Hopefully, whoever purchases this will facilitate having this test done. Hopefully, if you’re watching this, whoever has purchased this manuscript, you have a test that can be done here. And we have a bunch more tests. You don’t want to do just one test; you want to do a bunch of tests and see the pattern statistically. That would be really cool.

Nelson: And these are the tools you use, Nehemia, to learn more about these manuscripts.

Nehemia: It’s incredible! I sometimes think I’m living in… This is space age technology; I can’t believe this is real! That we’re able to do these tests that scholars, not just of previous generations, scholars in this generation couldn’t have dreamed of doing this type of test, and now we’re doing them. It’s absolutely amazing stuff! It’s really a blessing to have the opportunity to be involved with this kind of thing.

Nelson: Yes. And I know, Nehemia, the kind of work that it takes to index this and to make it available, so thank you. And thank you to IHBMR.com for allowing us to study this in real time. This is live and this was not planned.

Nehemia: No, that’s cool!

Nelson: We did not plan this out and say, “Let’s see if this works on IHBMR.com.” No, I wanted the audience to be able to see for themselves that they can look up the very things you’re looking up and you’re showing us.

Nehemia: I was a little bit afraid of a Steve Jobs moment, where we pull this up and it wouldn’t work. But thankfully it worked! Thank you, Leo.

Nelson: Thank you, Leo!

Nehemia: For working on the technology here. This is an amazing codex. There’s so much more that we could talk about, and we’ll probably do more programs on this because there’s a lot in this codex, it’s a really important codex. It’s mainly important because of its date, because of its relationship to the Aleppo Codex and the amount of it that’s been preserved.

One last comment I want to make here. I mentioned that it’s a Karaite manuscript. We’re talking about a period when people lived, and they didn’t say, “Oh, I can’t look at that manuscript. That’s from a group of people I don’t agree with.” They didn’t do that. They said, “Look, this is an accurate copy of the Bible, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Rabbinical Jew, if you’re a Karaite Jew.”

There were these families of Masoretes, and these people were highly trained, and they were very professional, and they reproduced what was given to them with a high degree of precision and accuracy, and their affiliation wasn’t something that people were concerned with. I wouldn’t say they weren’t concerned at all, but the fact is, you have manuscripts that were written by Karaites, and proofread by Karaites and corrected by them, and other ones that were done by Rabbinical Jews. And both communities accepted these manuscripts because it was considered the common heritage of the Jewish people. And there were definitely differences between different scribal families, we have ben Asher and ben Naftali, but it wasn’t something that the denominational divide… that wasn’t a factor as far as the reliability of the manuscripts in this early period.

Nelson: Thank you Nehemia. I think that’s an extremely important point that needs to be made.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: It’s scary to think if they had discriminated against these kinds of manuscripts because they were not written by Rabbinic scribes or vice versa, what could be lost to history if they were that narrow minded.

Nehemia: Yeah. That’s another thing that’s really interesting. If there had been this program where the rabbis decided, “Hey, we’re going to change a bunch of the vowels in the Bible because we don’t like somebody else’s theology.” Well, the Karaites would have called them out on it, and if the Karaites would have done that, then the rabbis would have called them out on it. So, you have each group looking over each other's shoulders, and they couldn’t change stuff even when they wanted to. And there are many instances where the rabbis wanted to, and they changed it for purposes of interpretation. They say, “We’re going to read this word as if it said something else.” But when it came to the Bible manuscripts and how you read the verse in the synagogue, they didn’t change that. They didn’t have the authority to, and they couldn’t get away with it. And even if they could get away with it, they wouldn’t have dared.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I’m excited to find out what happens with this codex. I don’t know who’s going to buy it, but hopefully they’ll want to have these tests done.

Nelson: Can I say something real quick? I’ll share my screen here. Can I share something that is on one of the links? Sotheby’s has a couple of links to this manuscript, and one of the links we’ll provide, it says The Remarkable History of the Codex Sassoon, and then the smaller title line says, “The earliest most complete Hebrew Bible is estimated to be the highest valued manuscript or historical document ever offered at auction.”

Nehemia: Wow!

Nelson: So, if I may get one thought from you, Nehemia, and that is, we’ve talked about the Big Six manuscripts. With the exception of Codex Sassoon, all of the other five manuscripts are in institutions. And so, this would be the only manuscript that’s been in private hands for a very long time, probably since its conception. So, when a manuscript of this degree and this pedigree is going to be auctioned and sold for, very likely tens of millions of dollars, what does that do to those other manuscripts that are regarded just as highly as this manuscript in these libraries and museums?

Nehemia: Well, and I just had this conversation with Vince Beiler of the University of Cambridge, and we’re going to be broadcasting that discussion that I had with him. He pointed out that this is… they have the expression, “the rising tide raises all ships”, so he thinks, or he suggested, that it’s possible that a bunch of things that have been sitting in vaults are going to start coming out, because somebody who has this from their grandfather in a vault somewhere is going to say, “Woah, this is worth ten million dollars! I didn’t know that! Let’s sell this thing! I just thought that was just some old book that my grandfather left me.” So that may happen, which I suppose is a good thing for scholars, because now we’ll have access to stuff that’s been hidden in vaults.

And I’ve got to say, so we talk about the Big Six; today I think we can talk about a lot more than six. If you take into account what’s in the Russian National Library in St Petersburg and some of the stuff from the Cairo Genizah… but the problem is that a lot of those are fragments. There might be ten pages here, or something this big in some instances. There’s a lot of stuff there that’s just waiting to be studied.

I found a Torah scroll in St Petersburg, Russia that I gave a lecture on at the World Congress of Jewish Studies, which is arguably just as important as any of these six… well, not the Aleppo Codex, but just as important as any of the other five. But it wasn’t known, and it still isn’t widely known. Why isn’t it known? Because it was sitting on top of a shelf in the Russian National Library and nobody knew when it was from, nobody knew exactly what was in it. So, there’s a lot of things out there that I think we’re going to look back 10 or 20 years from now, and instead of the Big Six we might be talking about the Big Six Hundred! And hopefully, we can be involved in bringing the world’s attention to… or maybe it’ll be 60. I don’t know, I have no idea.

But we have access today to more early Bible manuscripts than the greatest scholars of previous generations had access to. Rabbi Mordecai Breuer never had access to some of the manuscripts that I can pull up photos of on my computer right now in high resolution, and he wanted to have access to those, but he just didn’t. And now we do. So, we really live in a blessed age, and hopefully the owner of this manuscript, of the Sassoon Codex, has made the color images available, and they’re astounding images! They were photographed by a true artist, Ardon Bar-Hama, who is a great photographer, and he really is an artist, he’s such a good photographer. Hopefully, there’ll be even better images published using multispectral imaging and we can study this on a level that people couldn’t even have dreamed of in the past.

Nelson: And that photographer, I believe, was also the one who photographed the images of the Aleppo Codex that are...

Nehemia: Absolutely, he did! He’s the great photographer of manuscripts of our generation. Absolutely.

Nelson: Wow.

Nehemia: Any final words, Nelson?

Nelson: I think my only final words are that the codex has been going on a world tour. It’s been in London…

Nehemia: Oh! You’ve got to share this!

Nelson: It’s been in London, it’s been in Jerusalem, and most recently it was in Dallas at the Southern Methodist University, there at SMU. And I had the privilege of being able to represent IHBMR and go to see it for myself with our dear friend, Ze’ev, and my dear mother, who I have often talked to her about this manuscript and other Bible-related topics. She was available and so all three of us got a chance to go to SMU and see this manuscript there in person. It was a remarkably touching experience, it almost feels like a dream. I have to ask myself, “Did I really see this thing?” And it’s actually bigger, it’s actually quite big! I didn’t think it would be that big.

Nehemia: You can see I got my grubby hands on it! Pretty good size!

Nelson: Now I have a point of reference, yeah!

Nehemia: Yeah. And you didn’t just drive down the road; you actually flew to Dallas for a day just to visit the Sassoon Codex.

Nelson: Yes. I’m not in Dallas, I don’t live in Dallas. But I flew into Dallas, got to see it, and then flew back out the same day. And wow, the line was literally out the door to see this manuscript, literally out the door! And so, it will be auctioned off next month, May 17th.

Nehemia: I think it’s May 16th, if I’m not mistaken.

Nelson: 16th? Yes sir, 16th-17th.

Nehemia: Well, by the time this is broadcast that will be next week.

Nelson: And so, it will also be going to Los Angeles and then ultimately to New York, where it will be auctioned off. So, if you’re watching and you’re in the Los Angeles area, go look at it and witness history! Because what I got the chance to do, and people in London and Jerusalem got a chance to do, is something that has not been done with this kind of manuscript since it was written down.

Nehemia: And if you’ve got several tens of millions of dollars that you don’t know what to do with and you want to buy this and put it on permanent loan to the Institute of Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, we would be most grateful!

Nelson: Most! Thank you Nehemia, thank you for the opportunity.

Nehemia: Thank you for discussing this with me and representing IHBMR there.

Nelson: Oh, and just one more quick note.

Nehemia: Yeah?

Nelson: You mentioned a Torah Scroll that you got a chance to look at at the Russian National Library, and then you did a presentation about it at the World Conference of Jewish Studies. We did a podcast where we went under the hood and studied that manuscript in very fine detail, so we’ll link that podcast to this one as well.

Nehemia: Absolutely, for sure. Nelson, thank you so much for joining me and discussing this with people. I know a lot of people are really excited to see what happens with this manuscript, and hopefully they’ll get a better understanding and appreciation of the significance of this manuscript.

Nelson: Todah rabah, Nehemia. What a pleasure.

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