Leningrad Codex (WLC)

History

Behind this edition there is a single manuscript. Nearly every other text on this site is an edition — a work of many hands, over many copies and printings — but the Hebrew here is a transcription of a single codex. And that codex says who wrote it, where, for whom and when.

The scribe signed twice. On one leaf: “I Samuel b. Jacob have written, vowel-pointed and Massoretically annotated this Codex for the honoured Rabbi Meborach the Priest b. Joseph surnamed Ibn Osdad.” On another he explains what he copied from: the corrected copies “which the teacher Aaron b. Moses Ben-Asher redacted” (Ben-Asher worked in the tenth century), an exemplar he calls exceedingly accurate. The tradition Ginsburg records also ties the manuscript to the Jewish community of Cairo and to copies in the Ben-Asher tradition.

Samuel ben Jacob dated the volume by five different reckonings: the year of the creation of the world, the years since the exile of King Jehoiachin, the Seleucid era, the years since the destruction of the Second Temple, and the Muslim year. The dates do not agree perfectly, which is why the codex is usually dated 1008–1010.

It is this combination of age and explicit dating that makes the manuscript so important. Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries are rare, and the Catholic Encyclopedia itself observed that only a small number of the manuscripts known in its day were older than the twelfth century. Among the oldest it listed were the codex of the Latter Prophets of 916, Samuel ben Jacob’s codex, and the British Museum manuscript now known as Or. 4445, which Ginsburg dated to about 820–850.

The consonantal text, however, has to be kept apart from the vocalization. Ancient Hebrew was written essentially with consonants alone; the vowel signs and accents found in Masoretic manuscripts were developed later. The Catholic Encyclopedia distinguishes between the traditional pronunciation of Hebrew, already known in Saint Jerome’s day, and the system of Masoretic vowel signs we know from medieval manuscripts.

This does not mean the Clementine Vulgate was translated from a Hebrew text without vowels. The Clementine is an edition of the Latin Vulgate tradition, not a new translation of the Leningrad Codex. The comparison serves to show that the Hebrew as we see it today — with Masoretic vowel points and accents — belongs to a written tradition later than Saint Jerome.

The digital text used here is the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), an electronic transcription of the Leningrad Codex produced by the Westminster Hebrew Institute in Philadelphia. The edition distributed by eBible.org is based on it and is in the public domain.

Curiosities

The Masoretes were deeply conservative about the text: rather than simply correct an oddity in their exemplar, they often preserved it and recorded it with signs. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes among these oddities broken or inverted letters, consonants unusually large or small, and dots placed out of position.

One example is the inverted nun (׆). Numbers has two of them: one after 10:34 and another after 10:36, forming a kind of frame around 10:35–36. The same sign appears seven times in Psalm 107. It is not a letter to be pronounced but a textual mark whose original purpose is still debated; one ancient interpretation connected it to the idea that the marked passage was out of its proper place.

There are also the so-called extraordinary points (puncta extraordinaria): dots placed over certain letters or words. They appear at fifteen places in the traditional Hebrew text, among them Genesis 18:9 and Numbers 3:39. They are neither vowels nor modern punctuation; they belong to the traditional apparatus by which the text was handed down.

The Catholic Encyclopedia sums up the spirit of that transmission well: oddities that look like scribal errors today — broken or inverted letters, consonants larger or smaller than normal, dots out of position — could be preserved rather than simply removed by the copyist.

Another curiosity shows up in the numbering of the Psalms. In the Hebrew text, the heading of Psalm 51 is part of the numbered sequence: the note about David, Nathan and Bathsheba takes up verses 1 and 2, and the text that begins “Have mercy on me, God” comes at 51:3. In the Latin Vulgate tradition, followed by the Douay-Rheims, the same psalm is numbered Psalm 50 and the Miserere begins at 50:3.

The World English Bible, for its part, keeps the Hebrew numbering: the heading appears before 51:1, and “Have mercy on me, God” is the first numbered verse.

Why “Leningrad Codex”?

The name can seem odd, because the manuscript was not written in Leningrad. The codex is named for the city where it was kept for much of its modern history. It previously belonged to the collection of Abraham Firkovich and was acquired by the Imperial Public Library in Saint Petersburg in 1863. When the city was renamed Leningrad in 1924, the manuscript’s name settled in the scholarly literature as the Leningrad Codex.

The city became Saint Petersburg again in 1991, but the manuscript’s traditional name stayed. Today the codex is held by the National Library of Russia, in Saint Petersburg, under the shelfmark Firkovich B 19 A. “Leningrad Codex” is therefore a historical name, taken from where the manuscript was kept while the city was called Leningrad.

Sources

• Introduction to the Massoretico-critical edition of the Hebrew Bible (London, 1897) — Christian D. Ginsburg, pp. 243-245, on the colophons, the five datings and the exemplars associated with Ben-Asher.
• Hebrew Manuscripts in the Collections of the National Library of Russia — First Firkovich Collection — National Library of Russia, catalogue of the Firkovich collection. The institutional source for the identification of the Leningrad Codex, its dating to 1008-1010, its origin in Cairo, the scribe Samuel ben Jacob, the patron Mevorah ben Joseph, the shelfmark Firkovich B 19 A and the acquisition of the collection in 1863.
• Manuscripts of the Bible — Walter Drum, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York, 1910), on the dating of Hebrew manuscripts and on the oddities the copyists preserved.
• Massorah — Walter Drum, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York, 1911), on the Masoretic transmission, the vowel signs, the accents and the graphic peculiarities of the Hebrew text.
• Old Testament — The Catholic Encyclopedia, on the tradition of reading Hebrew in Saint Jerome’s day and the distinction between the traditional pronunciation and the later system of vowel signs.
• Westminster Leningrad Codex — electronic transcription of the Leningrad Codex produced by the Westminster Hebrew Institute in Philadelphia; text released into the public domain.