A picture depicting the 10th century Aleppo Codex is displayed during a news conference at Jerusalem’s Yad Ben-Zvi institute December 2, 2007. The institute said last month that a 1,000-year-old parchment, the size of a credit card, forms part of the Aleppo Codex, viewed by scholars as one of the most authoritative manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. The parchment was kept as a lucky charm by Sam Sabbagh, a Syrian Jew who in 1947 plucked it from the floor of an Aleppo synagogue that was torched after a United Nations decision to partition Palestine, paving the way for the creation of Israel.
Adolfo Roitman, the head curator of the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem, which holds the Codex, explained its significance, stating that all current versions of the Old Testament stem, “in one way or another, from this ancient manuscript.”
The Codex is believed to have been written somewhere around the year 930 in the town of Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. It has been moved around through several different cities, and as many as 190 pages are missing from the surviving copy, though scholars disagree where and when they were lost.
It was smuggled out of Syria and arrived in Israel in 1958, before it was eventually moved to the Israel Museum in the mid-1980s.
It is also not clear who precisely owns the Codex, though filmmaker Avi Dabach, who is planning to make a documentary about the ancient manuscript, believes that it belongs to the Jewish community that fled Syria.
“In the 1960s the Aleppo-Jewish community sued the people who brought the Codex to Israel. … The Israeli Authorities decided to confiscate this item and then, from a position of strength, force on the community an arrangement,” Dabach has said.
Although the Aleppo Codex is considered the oldest copy of the Hebrew Old Testament, there are much older fragments of biblical manuscripts in existence, such as the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls.
The scrolls, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, date back to the first and third centuries BCE, and contain texts from the Old Testament pertaining to the birth of Christianity. They are believed to have been hidden from approaching Roman armies in the caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Seas somewhere around 68 BCE.
I24News reported that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization added the millennium-old Codex earlier this week to its International Memory of the World Register, which honors some of the most important discoveries relating to human history.
Original Article: http://www.christianpost.com/news/hebrew-bible-aleppo-codex-oldest-surviving-copy-unesco-world-treasure-157420/#72tudOU5midouDp0.99
Jasper and Sardine 