A Bible lost and only partly found

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, history, bible, manuscripts

Interested in translating the Hebrew Bible for yourself? Step 1: learn the Hebrew of the Sixth Century BCE. Then get access to a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, preferably the Leningrad Codex. This clip is from Exodus. Links to biblical texts are found at this Brandeis University page. That is step 2. Step 3 is to begin translating.

What is a critical edition? It is one that contains the most accurate compilation from all earlier manuscripts (see an example below), plus apparatuses that help a translator. For Biblical Hebrew, these include headnotes, footnotes and indications of the frequency of special words, and most importantly the diacritical marks above and below the letters, which indicate pronunciation and even the stress or emphasis to use while reading aloud. This helps a translating scholar determine the precise meaning of a word.

Think of the English "word" display. It is actually three words. As a noun or a verb, it is stressed dis-PLAY, but as an adjective most people say DIS-play. Then there is dove; to refer to a lovely, cooing bird, we say duvv, but the past tense of dive is pronounced dohv.

This situation is tougher in Hebrew, which has only one explicit vowel (aleph) and one semivowel (yod). SPPS NGLSH WR WRTTN THAT WY? (and without the question mark, either…nor any spaces between words!) How could you tell the difference between meet, met, mite, meat, and mete?

The self-chosen task of the Masoretes was to gather a compilation from the best manuscripts such as the Second Century CE one shown here, to produce an edition such as the Eleventh Century Leningrad Codex shown above. It is not known whether the original books were written this way, or whether there were word separations and punctuation, at least. All surviving early manuscripts look like this one. But the Masoretes had centuries of oral tradition and scholarship regarding how every word was to be pronounced during public reading, knowledge of which words were unique or used but twice (even if a certain string of consonants did not appear unique; its vowel sounds did differ).

They also developed methods to ensure faithful copying. A sheet of parchment was prepared by scoring with a grid. Each grid cell was to contain one letter. Every page of the entire Bible was gridded and thus would be identical to that in every other Masoretic copy.

The Leningrad Codex, dated about 1008, is the earliest complete Hebrew Bible, and the best. There was once a chance to make it second best, as we read in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible by Matti Friedman. The 500-leaf (1,000 page) manuscript that became known as the Aleppo Codex (more here) was produced in the same generation as the Leningrad Codex, but in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, rather than in Cairo. It was the work of a single scribe, supervised by the chief scholar of his generation, and double-checked by the scholar and other skilled copyists to ensure that every letter, every vowel point, every item was perfect.

Mr. Friendman is currently based in Jerusalem, where the surviving portions of the Aleppo Codex are housed. By his account, during several years he crisscrossed the world to track down the manuscript's story. The book is part historical chronicle, part whodunit, but the "who" remains obscure, right to the end. It is hard to interview sources when most of them are dead.

The Aleppo Codex looks a lot like the Leningrad. This portion, from the end of Deuteronomy, shows purple stains at the page corners that have been touted as burn marks, but are actually fungus.

The manuscript was intended to guide scholars and copyists. It was used by Moses Maimonides, who was its custodian in the late 1100s. Sadly, he was the last scholar to use the book for its intended purpose. During later upheavals, it was taken first to one place, then to another, and eventually to Aleppo, in Syria, to the oldest Jewish community in the area (the Jews of Aleppo were there before the Syrians). It was kept safely in Aleppo for 600 years, until the day the UN voted to divide Palestine, setting up the state of Israel for the Jews after nearly 1,900 years as a stateless people.

In the rioting that followed the announcement, in late 1947 (just three weeks after I was born), the Great Synagogue of Aleppo was burned, and all the manuscripts scattered, including those in a doubly locked box. What happened next is a great mystery, one Friedman has largely solved, but not entirely. For months it was thought that the manuscript, called the Crown of Aleppo, had been burned. But it was not. That was a cover story. It was taken first to Turkey and then to Jerusalem.

At some point, about 40% of the leaves went missing, including nearly all the Torah, and the portion at the end that contains much of the Prophets. The remaining portions have been photographed (finally!) and images may be found at the link above.

The pages have a rather distinctive look, as this image shows. While all Masoretic texts are identical in layout, including where each letter is on each page, the handwriting is distinctive. The entire Aleppo Codex was crafted by a single scribe. Many others are in the hand of more than one scribe. Experts can recognize the handwriting. Even I can see that this scribe wrote more regularly and precisely than the scribe who wrote the Leningrad fragment shown above. It is the nearest thing to a machine-printed page produced in manuscript history.

Author Friedman set himself to peel back the layers of a very deep onion, to determine the true story of this manuscript's travels, and if possible to determine what became of the missing portions. He had the very great help of at least one or two of the principal players who were still living. He was also able to obtain documents that had been kept hidden for half a century, and it is likely that his narrative is accurate. His first objective was thus achieved. But not the second. When did the missing parts go missing, and who is responsible? Suspicion falls on a certain person, but much documentary evidence that could corroborate the suspicions of the remaining players has been lost, destroyed, or was never produced. A 4-year trial in the 1950s led to more obscurity, requiring much detective work to pick out the story from misdirection on nearly everyone's part.

We could have had a perfect Bible, in Friedman's opinion. The opportunity was squandered.

Battling my acquisitive nature

kw: collecting, manuscripts

About an hour ago I had this document in my hands (protected by an acetate sleeve), while on a visit to the Stamp Center. It is described thus:

"Lot 390. Manuscript court document dated 1502 & signed by Queen Isabella I "Yo La Reyna" (I the Queen) 8"x10" w/ authentification by Dr. R. Ayerbe-Chaux of Syracuse Univ Document shows normal aging & toning but no tears, repairs or restoration is evident, far nicer than the few others that have appeared on the market on occasion. This dictate concerns a financial dispute between the "Village of Madrid" & the Real De Manzanares a Unique historical item!"

As a lover of history, I was strongly drawn to attend the auction (in a couple days) and bid. The manuscript is likely to auction for a few thousand dollars. However, if I buy it, where will I keep it? Hanging it on a wall at home is too scary. I don't have anything else of comparable value except a nice piano, which would be much harder to steal! I'd need to rent a larger safe deposit box at the bank to avoid rolling or folding it.

Too much trouble. Whew! Glad that is over. 

Archimedes - more modern than we knew

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ancient history, manuscripts, history of science

It may hold the record for the most money paid at auction for the ugliest book (US$2.2 million). It was a wreck. Its sale has caused endless speculation—mainly about who bought it—and endless joy among historians of science, plus endless fascination by quite a variety of scientists who had previously had little truck with "old books."

Word of the day: palimpsest. Noun. "A manuscript that has been written on more than once; the earlier writing is often incompletely erased and partially legible." See FreeDictionary for more details) Origin: Greek palin (παλιν) "again" + psēn (πσην) "scrape". Why "again"? Parchment is animal skin, soaked and scraped to remove hair and fat. So to "erase" older writing, a sheet could be soaked and scraped again.

This helps understand the importance of a 13^th Century prayer book comprised of sheets from a number of older works, including 10^th Century manuscript copies of three documents written by Archimedes more than a millennium earlier.

This "ugly book", shown here during its display at Chicago's Field Museum, is a rare find indeed. It is the only surviving codex (bound book, as contrasted with a wound scroll) of Archimedes' work. All images in this post are Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, used by permission.

The Archimedes Palimpsest, AKA Archimedes Codex C, contains most or all (not yet sure) of the text of Floating Bodies, Method and Stomachion, works previously very little known from incomplete quotes. Why "C"? Two other codexes, "A" and "B", existed in "slightly modern" times, but vanished a century or two ago. We don't have them in Greek any more, but in translations...all partial, ranging from good to "interpreted" (i.e. paraphrased).

Late in 1998, when Codex C was auctioned, a museum curator somewhat hopefully contacted a well-known dealer in manuscripts with the suggestion that the Walters Art Museum might be a suitable venue for public exhibit and scholarly study. "The Walters" in Baltimore, Maryland houses and cares for a large collection of manuscripts. Imagine his surprise to find out the buyer already knew of the Walters and considered it the best such venue!

After a relatively short time (compared to the document's age) the dealer and the owner of the codex visited Will Noel to discuss its curation. This was a formality: the owner had it in a bag he was carrying, and that was that! Dr. Noel and a colleague, historian Reviel Netz of Stanford, became the lead investigators. After nearly ten amazing (and arduous) years of work, they have written The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist. The work has gone amazingly fast, primarily because the owner, is a "rich patron" who makes quick decisions and is very interested in the findings.

What is it like to deal with a palimpsest? Codex C has 174 "leaves", or parchment sheets, folded in the middle and bound together. This produces 348 "pages" with 696 "sides". This photo, taken in deep blue plus near-ultraviolet, shows the state of the art for a hundred years or so, since it became feasible to produce UV light. The sheet is oriented so the Archimedes text is readable, if you read Byzantine Greek. Two diagrams are also visible. The text was written in two columns.

The way UV makes both texts visible is by fluorescence. If you have a "black light" tube, shine it on your skin in a darkened room. That dim bluish look is flourescence (your teeth are much brighter-look in a mirror, but not for too long: UV is bad for your eyes). Ink is not fluorescent, whether it is iron-based or carbon-based. So the bluish light from the parchment is blocked by the older ink almost as much as the newer, because some of it had soaked into the parchment and absorbs light from beneath. To take such an image, the camera has a filter that blocks the UV but passes the fluorescent colors. The full-size version of this image can be found at the Archimedes Palimpsest web site.

The overlay of late Byzantine Greek prayers runs vertically, which is typical of a palimpsest: cut a re-scraped sheet in half (where it was bound) and rotate it, so you can write over it with less distraction from the remaining under-text. This text is in one wider column per "side". This is sides "017r-016v", or the reverse of half-sheet 17 and obverse of 16. Adding the other side, the sheet's contents are 15r-16v-17r-18v; "r" and "v" mean recto and verso, or front and back in Latin.

"Well," you might say, "It looks straightforward. Take the sheets out of the 'book' and photograph them in UV light. Then read it right off." But you knew, didn't you, that it isn't that simple? Firstly, taking out the sheets, or disbinding, was a horrific task; the book had been rebound a number of times, most recently with something like the "white glue" named after a famous cartoon bull. Modern polymer-based glues are hard to dissolve without also dissolving parchment!

Enter Abigail Quandt. Her work is the key to all later successes. Disbinding Codex C took her four years. That is around eight days per sheet (the profession's word for sheet is "folio", the term you'll find in the book).

Once she had "released" a sheet from its binding, Drs. Noel, Netz, and an ever-growing team could begin their work on it. This corner of a page shows a rather good section that is almost readable without doing a letter-by-letter puzzling out of the text...at least for someone who is familiar with 10^th Century Greek manuscripts already! This image is a little more sophisticated than the prior one: digital images of UV and visible were subtracted to enhance a text that was all but invisible in UV light alone. But what to do with even-less visible text, and the few sheets with rather recently-forged iconography painted and gold-leafed over both older texts?!?

This image and that which follows are two similar methods of multi-spectral imaging. Several imaging teams have worked with the authors over the years, and on one occasion a competition was held between two teams. Both worked out schemes that emphasized the very slight color difference between the 10^th Century iron-based ink (seen as red) and the later carbon-based ink (seen as blue-black).

My brother, one of whose skills is "scribe", described for me how medieval ink was made using red iron oxide, oak gall bitters, and carbon black. Later inks using linseed or other oils and carbon black were used because they are easier to make, and rooms full of monks busily writing at "publishing" monasteries needed an abundant supply...carbon black is easily made and needs no grinding.

These lovely images show the same portion of a sheet, with essentially no difference in legibility, but before the computer got hold of the various narrow-band images, the sheet looked blank under any "eyeball" presentation at any wavelength...at least there was no visible under-text. To these folks, the 13^th Century text is part of "blank".

Over time, the extension of such techniques has yielded readable, or at least decipherable, text for all but the four sheets overlaid with forged images (it is supposed that someone in the 1920s or '30s tried to make the ugly book prettier for a quick, and more lucrative, sale).

X-ray fluorescence provided the answer. A proof-of-concept yielded an "iron image" right through the gold leaf...in fifteen hours for about a square inch. Work currently under weigh, or perhaps recently finished —it was just beginning as the book was printed—, uses the much brighter X-rays produced by an atom-smasher, and is much, much faster.

I've worked with folks on a project using such X-rays. You have to be careful with the beam. They typically keep a sheet of paper in front of the beam port. When it bursts into flame, the beam is "on". So you block the port, put the filters in place for your current experiment (usually, chunks of aluminum!), and open the port to make your readings. Of course, the blocking and unblocking of ports is done from outside the room!!!

What discoveries did all this lead to? Besides the texts themselves, they revealed an Archimedes who was much more modern in his thinking than we imagined. And his work was not the only material bound into the codex, but I'll leave off discussing the other documents with which his three texts have kept company for a millenium.

Firstly, Method reveals how Archimedes determined the area or volume of certain curved shapes. In at least one instance, rather than sneak up on the infinite quantities that can arise in such calculations, he used them directly. If you write your equation appropriately, you can divide two infinities and get a non-infinite result. This is the basis of all calculus, meaning all of modern engineering and much of physics. Before Codex C, it was not known that Archimedes was able to calculate using infinite quantities.

Secondly, On Floating Bodies reveals an Archimedes quite different from the legendary buffoon that ran naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!". He already understood the principle of displacement, and in this work he showed how to quantify the density of a floating, or sunken, body. I recently used his method to measure the density of a chunk of rock I've carried around since finding it in a barren field in Oklahoma. Its density is 3.6, which is dead-on for a stony meteorite, but too heavy to be a misplaced piece of basalt (3.0-3.2). Now I gotta get an expert to look at it...

Thirdly, Stomachion, the "belly-ache", is a playful puzzle, a square cut into fourteen triangles. It is rather hard to re-assemble after you mix up the pieces, yet there are 17,152 ways to put it together (and millions of ways to be wrong). Archimedes proposes determining how many ways there are, and the researchers found he had the mathematical tools to arrive at the correct answer, without need for a computer.

The story of this ugly book is not over. It has yielded conceptual beauty of several kinds, with much more to come. These people have job security!

The three "Peoples of the Book"

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, religion, judaism, christianity, islam, manuscripts

F. E. Peters, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, has recently published The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, a survey of the development of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran.

This relatively recent illuminated manuscript of Psalms in Hebrew shows how the decorative styles of manuscript production had developed even among the image-averse Jews, by Renaissance times. This is a late subject in Dr. Peters's work. He begins with a comparative history of the three collections. The Hebrew Bible—which he consistently calls "the Bible", reserving that term for the Book of the Jews—came first, its earliest sections dating before the first millennium BCE. The contention of "higher critics" who late-date the books to periods long after the events they record, are given the lie by fragments from the book of Numbers and others dating prior to 700 BCE. The familiar prayer, "The LORD bless thee and keep thee" is one of these.

The Hebrew Bible, as distinguished from the Christian Old Testament—they are substantially different—was gathered together in stages covering at least a thousand years. Ezra is traditionally considered to have fixed it in text and form, as its last significant editor.

Editors, ah, the neglected conservers of Scripture, for all three Books. Every "book" and chapter in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Testament, and the Quran, show clear signs of editing, to the point that some writers have called them "a pastiche".

To a believer, of course, it makes little difference whether Samuel wrote the chapters containing his life and experiences, in the form we see them today, or if an Isaiah or Ezra edited the work; editors can be just as inspired as authors. I happen to believe that Genesis, in particular, was stitched together by Moses, partly from family records and journals of the patriarchs, and perhaps pre-Flood generations, and partly from sagas and poems. He would then be the first Bible editor.

That Moses's work has been further edited is shown by such things as the "camels" in Genesis 24; in the times of Abraham and Moses, they would have been asses. A later writer translated the work for a people whose language and culture had changed over centuries. I care little if the Hebrew of Moses no longer exists, being replaced by a later tongue, the Hebrew still learned by Jewish children. God knows how to take care of His message.

This image, from the Bodmer manuscript known as P66, was written in the 2d Century CE, probably shortly after 150AD. It is in the Greek of the time, often called "koine", which a Greek friend tells me is synonymous with "street", as in "street talk".

Though the New Testament was produced over less than a century, it is similarly a collection, and it may be that Matthew in particular was edited from two or more older Gospels, now lost (unless one of them was Mark, which is likely). It may be that other NT books were similarly produced, and perhaps the last section of Mark is an addendum. Again, this doesn't matter to a believer; God knows how to transmit what He wants us to know.

This illuminated Quran sheet (suras 1-3) is also from a later time, when decoration of the page had become common. Muslims are much more image-averse than Jews, so while they may decorate with plants and birds, no mammal images, and of course no human figures, are used. To play it safe, geometric figures are the norm.

The Quran, meaning "recitation", is also a collection, but from a single person, covering a known span of 22 years. The suras were initially memorized, and the production of a written Quran was instigated by the observation that large numbers of those who had memorized the whole were dying, mainly by warfare. A written or printed Quran has the suras in order by length, except for an opening short prayer/poem. (Note that most books of the New Testament are also roughly in length order, longest first.) The only indication of relative age is the indication Mecca or Medina, as the place of first speaking.

A lot of scholarship has gone into ordering the suras chronologically, and to producing a biography of Muhammad that is more than a legendary epic. Unlike the other two Books, the Quran entirely obscures its reciter, consisting of instruction, liturgy, and devotional poetry.

These surveys of the books' historical development go in parallel in The Voice, the Word, the Books. The author dwells on the creative tension between oral and literate cultures, noting in particular the weakening of memory that results from reliance on writing! Whereas most today quail at memorizing just one Psalm or chapter of Matthew, thousands of Muslims in the generations following that of Muhammad memorized the entire Quran, which is about half the size of the New Testament (78,000 words versus 138,000).

Once a shift had occurred from an oral to a literate society, societal changes followed. Now a student could line up Kings and Chronicles, or the four Gospels, and compare them. The mandate at the end of Deuteronomy, that all Israelites essentially wallpaper their houses with Scripture, and read from it daily, was closer to fulfillment, though phylacteries and mezuzahs are a poor substitute. But God essentially mandated 100% literacy upon a people largely illiterate, and the change took centuries (I think this mandate largely underlies the Jews' excellence in education).

There is a charming section near the end of the book about oral use of Scripture, such as lectio divina of the Catholic tradition and devotional reading of some christian groups (and pray-reading among my people). The point is well made that much prayer, historically, consisted of reciting God's words back to God, particularly those containing promises one hoped God would rapidly fulfill.

It seems to me Dr. Peters strives to show the similarities among the three "Peoples of the Book". However, their great differences stand out. The Hebrews were given the Law, initially at Mount Sinai, then further stipulations later on. Later prophets, such as Jeremiah, hinted at a law to be "written on the heart" that would supersede the Levitical Law. The Christians claimed this in the teachings of Jesus, and the book of Hebrews is the fullest development.

Though the Quran gives minimal lip service to the older two Books, Muslims claim that Jews and Christians have "misused" their Scriptures, even to the point of editing out references to Muhammad that they claim were originally there.

The reference I see to Muhammad's people is in the ambiguous "blessing" on Ishmael, of whose descendants the LORD God said, "[they] shall live in defiance of all his brethren." We see this in spades today! Yet multitudes of Muslims live in peace with their neighbors; only a radical few genuinely believe they are called to take over the world. With such no peace is possible.

As I have written before, not only Judaism and Christianity went through jingoistic periods of military conquest (the invasion of Canaan, the Crusades), so did Buddhism and Hinduism. They all settled down about the time they reached an age of 2,000 years. This seems to be the time it takes a religion to mature. Islam, being but 1,300 years old, has a way to go. The clearly insane ferocity of some indicates definitely how insecure they are in their own faith. They are in mortal terror that their children...or some of them!...will be converted to another faith. Like any cornered animal, they fight. We have a long road ahead.