The Hunt for the Aleppo Codex

Written by Calvin on September 30th, 2008

This story is actually rather interesting (HT: Doug Mangum). I find it so for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that we were discussing this in my Textual Criticism class barely a week past. Obviously finding additional pages of the Aleppo Codex would be interesting. Dr. Saley told a story similar to the story the AP article relates–people running into a burning synagogue to save a few pages of the codex, etc.

I personally think the whole story of the Aleppo Codex is quite fascinating from a sociological, or perhaps psychological, standpoint. The way communities, and individuals become attached to particular editions of a sacred text. Understandably, when you have a copy of the text that is over 1,000 year old you’d want to protect it. The idea that one would be forbidden from taking photographs, and/or making an in depth study of a codex is probably foreign to our western thinking (certainly when the average American can go buy various editions of the Hebrew Bible for a couple bucks at Amazon.com). Regardless, it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this newest effort to obtain additional portions of the Aleppo Codex.

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