A Masoretic Note in the Aleppo Codex Concerning the Composite Words

Yosef Ofer

The Masoretic Annotations of the Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex, the Bible MS vocalized and accentuated by the Masorete Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher, is the most important manuscript dating from the masoretic period. For this reason, any evidence relating to the lost parts of the Codex is extremely significant. According to various descrip• tions of the Codex, and especially according to the detailed description compiled by U. Cassuto,1 we know that both at the beginning and at the end of the Codex there were pages of material resembling the "Grammar of the Masorah" as well as various masoretic lists.2

• Most of the issues dealt with in this paper were presented at the 15th Congress of the International Organization for Masoretic Studies (IOMS), that took place in Basel on August 6th, 2001, as a part of IOSOT XVIlth Congress. The following is a list of abbreviations for biblical manuscripts cited: K = the Aleppo Codex, photo-printed, Jerusalem 1976. 7 = MS St. Petersburg, the National Library of Russia, Evr I B 19a, the entire Bible. 37 = MS St. Petersburg, the National Library of Russia, Evr II B 10, the Pentateuch (Institute for Hebrew Manuscript Photocopies in Jerusalem: F 62964). 147 = MS St. Petersburg, the National Library of Russia, Evr II C 144 (termed in Baer and Strack, Dikduke Ha-T'amim: T pap. 1; F 70095, F 46096), Prophets. p = MS Cairo, Gottheil 34, Prophets. IV= MS Jerusalem Heb 24° 5702 (in the past: Sasoon 507), the Pentateuch. ll!l = MS Sasoon 1053, the entire Bible. 1 = Miqra'ot Gedolot (printed), Venice 1524-1525.

1 See Y. Ofer, "M. D. Cassuto's Notes on the Aleppo Codex," Sefunot: Studies and Sources on the History of the Jewish Communities in the East n.s. 4 (19) Oerusalem, 1989) 277-344 (Heb.). Cassuto's description of the annotations to the Codex and the passages he copied from these annotations appear on pp. 291-308.

2 There were seven pages at the beginning of the Codex, i.e., before the pages carrying the Torah text, and twenty additional pages at its end, i.e., after the end of

[Textus 21 (2002) 209-233] 210 Yosef Ofer

There is also evidence of copies having been made of this masoretic material: one copy was made for W. Wickes,3 who wrote a book about the accentuation rules. A second copy was made for A Firkovich, and found its way to S. Baer and H. L. Strack, who made use of it in their edition of Die Dikduke Ha-Teamim .4 The whereabouts of both of these copies are unknown today. I have recently been successful in locating the archive of Yitzhak Seligman Baer amongst the manuscripts of the Ginsburg collection in Moscow.5 This archive contains a complete copy of the masoretic material included in the Aleppo Codex before the Bible text and after it. In this paper I propose to consider an important masoretic note from this material, concerning the

the last of the biblical books. Cassuto, who succeeded in viewing the Codex in its entirety in 1943, wrote up a full, detailed description of these pages, but copied over in full only a small portion of the material.

3 See W. Wickes, A Treatise on the Accentuation of the Twenty-one So-called Prose Books of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1877; photo repr. New York: Ktav, 1970) preface, pp. [5]-[6] (the pages of the introduction at the beginning of the book are not numbered).

4 S. Baer and H . L. Strack, Die Dikduke Ha-Teamim des Ahron ben Moscheh ben Ascher und andere alte grammatisch-massorethische Lehrstiicke (Leipzig, 1879; repr. Jerusalem, 1970).

s The archives are known as MS Moscow, Ginsburg 1500. The identifying mark of the film in the Institute for Photocopies of Hebrew Manuscripts is F 48538. In the lnstitute's card-file the contents of the MS are defined as follows: "Copies of Yitzhak Baer." Yitzhak Baer's handwriting can be identified, for example, by a handwritten letter he wrote in 1853 to Rabbi Elyakim Carmoly (MS Moscow, Ginsburg 1370 - F 48447). The contents of the archive, too, confirm clearly the correctness of this identification, for it contains many letters written to Baer by H . Strack, his co-worker in preparing the edition of Dikduke Ha-Teamim, as well as copies of various MSS serving as the basis of this edition (See infra, n. 49). In the Baer archive there are hundreds of pages written in his handwriting, most of which deal with topics connected with the Masorah, and the rest, on topics concerning Hebrew poetry. The material of the archive has been classified into 27 sections, the contents of each being defined in French at the head of each section.