… Then here’s a site worth checking out!
The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research at Westminster Theological Seminary recently made the Leningrad Codex
available online. As you may or may not know, the Leningrad Codex is one of the oldest manuscripts of the complete Hebrew Old Testament, being dated around 1008 A.D. (The cover page is pictured to the left.) This manuscript serves also as the basis for the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or BHS, which is the most widely used edition of the Hebrew Old Testament among biblical scholars today
The Leningrad Codex site makes the text easily searchable. You can customize the layout by chapter, verse, full text or simplified formats. You can also customize the content, by bringing out accents, vowels, consonants or morphology and you can change the font size. This makes the Hebrew text very user-friendly, while providing a quick online resource if you need to look up the Hebrew and don’t have your Hebrew Old Testament available or your Logos/BibleWorks software open.
On the negative side, it does include the option to “turn on” the historical-critical “documentary hypothesis” and customize that view as well. The “documentary hypothesis” claims that the first five books (known as the Pentateuch) of the Old Testament were cobbled together from a wide variety of independent sources. This “hypothesis” essentially denies Moses’ authorship of these books and is one of the more well-known ways the historical-critical approach to Biblical interpretation attempts to carve up and ruin the inspired Word of God. Thankfully, you can actually turn the “documentary hypothesis” off on the website and thereby ignore altogether it as you study the text.
Also on the topic of Biblical Hebrew…
An even older manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex does exist, but since 1947, pages of the manuscript have been missing. What that particular manuscript, also known as the Crown of Aleppo, has gone through over the centuries is fascinating. It seems until 1947 the manuscript was extant (in fact, it is said that the Leningrad Codex was corrected against the Aleppo Codex!), but pages went missing as it made its way from Aleppo, Syria (hence the name) and Israel. Last week FoxNews.com had an interesting update on how scholars continue the search for these missing pages.













