Leningrad Codex

The Leningrad codex is the oldest surviving complete copy of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, dated 1008. (The Aleppo Codex is presumably a few decades older, but parts are missing.) The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (the edition of the Hebrew Bible most widely referred to by scholars and Bible translators) is an almost exact transcript. It contains the complete text of the Hebrew Bible (though the order differs slightly from most published Hebrew Bibles in that Chronicles precedes Psalms and Job comes before Proverbs). It also has extensive Masoretic notes .

According to its colophon, it was copied from manuscripts written by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. Unusually for a masoretic codex, the same man (Samuel ben Jacob ) wrote the consonants, the vowels and the Masoretic notes. It is believed to be the manuscript most faithful to ben Asher's tradition apart from the Aleppo Codex itself. There are numerous alterations and erasures, and it was suggested by Moshe Goshen-Gottstein that an existing text not following ben Asher's rules was heavily amended so as to make it conform to these rules.

Nomenclature

The Leningrad codex is so called because it has been housed at the Russian National Library in Leningrad since the late Nineteenth Century, and because it is a codex (as opposed to a scroll). It is often referred to by its library code of B19a. Writers before the Russian Revolution of course called it the St. Petersburg Codex.

See also

• Aleppo Codex