Douglas Somerset
Puritan Board Freshman
Thanks Iain. How does one navigate the online Aleppo codex? There used to be a "Table of contents" but that seems to have disappeared. What does the "19" mean in "19-177-v". I assumed that the numbers were the extant books in order, but that did not seem to be the case. Also, is there an online Second Rabbinic Bible or do you just happen to have an extensive private library!?Thanks, Douglas. This is an interesting conversation, in which I am learning a lot. It is true that the Aleppo Codex has adonai yehowah in Ezek. 28:22 (bottom of right hand column, page 19-177-v). This is not the normal pattern for the Aleppo codex, however, as you can see from Ezek. 28:24 and 25 (middle of center column, same page) where it has adonai yehowih, indicating that it should be read adonai elohim (Lord God). As you noted earlier, for the divine name alone, Aleppo routinely has the unpronounceable yehwah, with only very rarely a cholem added. We might add that Leningrad and the Second Rabbinic Bible both have adonai yehowih at Ezekiel 28:22, suggesting that Aleppo made a mistake here. It's easy to imagine how that might happen, since it would simply be accidentally reverting to the normal vowel under the last syllable instead of carrying through the full set of vowels for Elohim.
For the original source of the Aleppo Codex, see here:
www.aleppocodex.org
With regard to the Aleppo codex, the erratic pointing of the Divine name may be a collection of mistakes, or a random use of equivalent alternatives, but I think it would be worth someone investigating the possibility that it was deliberate. The Codex was very carefully done by (presumably) a very clever man, and also it seems for parts of its life to have been a public codex in the sense that it was in use. So mistakes would have been detected. I don't know what they did with mistakes? I think they were supposed to throw out the codex, but obviously this didn't happen with a valuable codex like this one. I feel that there is a research project in comparing the pointing of the Divine name in the Leningrad and Aleppo codices. They don't seem to be quite the same.
Along these lines, presumably Raymond Martini got his "information" about the name "Jehovah" from a MS that was routinely pointing the Divine name with the cholem. So how do these MSS relate to those like the Leningrad and Aleppo which don't routinely use the cholem? There has been a lot of research on the use of the metheg, but to me this is a more interesting issue. Perhaps not to you!