Other Samuel b. Jacob manuscripts and revisiting דֶּ֔שֶׁא vs. דֶּ֗שֶׁא

[99asteroids]

Benjamin Outhwaite, who is the head of the Geniza Research Unit at Cambridge, has helped me track down a few unicorns. I'm talking about Genesis-containing manuscripts written by Mr. Leningradensis himself: Samuel ben Jacob. I think these manuscripts could be used to resolve ambiguous readings in L, especially since he was known to write the consonants, pointing, and masorah in his manuscripts all by himself. And I will introduce a case in point in a moment that we discussed earlier, the controversy over whether we have דֶּ֔שֶׁא or דֶּ֗שֶׁא in Genesis 1:11.

 

But first, the manuscripts.

 

First, there's St. Petersburg EVR II C 1, which is a Torah Codex with commentary by Saadia. Unfortunately, it is missing all of Genesis 1, which is the chapter most in need of a second opinion.

 

Second, there's almost-the-Holy-Grail, namely, St. Petersburg EVR II B 93. Much of this obscure collection of fragments has recently been established by Vincent Beiler, one of Outhwaite's colleagues, to be by the hand of Samuel ben Jacob. And when I say recently, I mean this paper was published May 23, 2024 (see "Samuel b. Jacob and St. Petersburg EVR II B 60+"). And I say "much of" because the classmark B 93 has several different manuscript fragments in it. Thankfully, his paper says which leaves are not Samuel ben Jacob's Torah. B 93 has Genesis 1, but it's well-damaged, with only about half of the chapter intact. Luckily, what is intact happens to mostly be in the right spots such that it has resolved almost all of my notes about ambiguities in L's Genesis 1.

 

Third, there's the Holy Grail: "Lm" or "Gottheil 14." This is a complete Torah codex by Samuel ben Jacob. Very most highly unfortunately with sackcloth and ashes on top, Outhwaite has informed me that this manuscript is locked away in a bank vault in New York in private hands, and it has not been digitized. I want to shout a bad word.

 

For the three or four other known manuscripts by SbJ, see the article "Two New Fragments from the Scribe Behind the Leningrad Codex," which gives a complete list, minus the fragments that Beiler has recently identified.

 

So all we have that's viewable for Genesis 1 is B 93. Fortunately, it has almost all the vague spots I took notes on. For example, it has the missing shureq that flaked off of the edge of L in verse 26, there is indeed a maqqef in oseh-periy in verse 12 (often missing in the printed versions), the missing accents and dageshes are all there. Long story short, it confirms that BHS/BHQ/BHL have gotten the close calls right. Except for one call, verse 11, where the 1482 first printed Torah, BHK1-3, and BHS have דֶּ֔שֶׁא, while BHQ, BHL, MAM, and tanach.us (with its silly note about the hatef seghol under Elohim) have דֶּ֗שֶׁא. Here's what B 93 has:

 

It's a zaqef. I think Kittel got something right. That blob with a fainter blob above it with a tiny concentration of black ink is probably a zaqef.

 

Finally, if you're wondering whether SbJ is consistent in his use of gaya across manuscripts, the answer is no. If you're wondering whether he's consistent in his placing of the gaya to the right or left of the vowel in the same word in the same verse across manuscripts, the answer is no. The bizarre interest BHS and BHQ (but not BHK) have in placing the gaya to the right or left is a pointless exercise.

 

@Ben Denckla @Brian K. Mitchell @Abram K-J

 

 

 

[99asteroids]

I meant for Gottheil 14 to link to this: https://archive.org/details/jstor-1451043/page/n23/mode/2up

[99asteroids]

Holeee-cow, y'all.

 

I just got this message from Benjamin Outhwaite:

 

Yes, I’m afraid that Gottheil 14 is Lm, which is in possession of the Lehman family of New York. Quite how it came to leave Egypt, and whether it did so before or after the crucial UNESCO date of 1970,  is a question that the US owners might not want to address, which is perhaps why they are reluctant to allow it to be put on display.

 

Breuer wrote a study of its masora — in 2 volumes, which I have. He worked on the basis of a microfilm, which is not, as far as I’m aware, in the possession of the NLI.

 

As for the record on Ktiv — you’ll see it says ‘illustrated works’ — I think that means that only the illuminated carpet pages are on file at the NLI. And perhaps a shot of the opening page — but I’m not entirely sure. I can ask a friend who works there. BUT, it just happens, that I might be able to help (see attached)!!! I’d forgotten I had this. But someone took a few photos for me when they were in the NLI. Is it the accent on דשא you’re interested in? If so, you’re in luck.

 

[99asteroids]

Not the clearest image but deshe has a revia here. It's extremely rare to find a full first page of Genesis, but to have one by Samuel ben Jacob that's locked in a vault, but a researcher at Cambridge just happens to have an image on his computer is unbelievable.

 

@Ben Denckla @Brian K. Mitchell @Abram K-J

Edited May 31 by 99asteroids

[99asteroids]

I have a better resolution copy of the Lm image than what's posted above, and I just finished comparing it. It has Genesis 1:1-1:11a, and it confirms the printed editions in all details except the דֶּשֶׁא controversy, where it favors revia, and except for the gayas in the three instances of לָרָקִיַע in verses 7 and 8. Here's the first instance, in L and then Lm.

 

[99asteroids]

Although it's faded, L has a gaya. BHK1-3 has it, as does Koren. But all editions of BHS as well as BHL, BHQ, WLC and all its digital descendants, including tanach.us and MAM are missing the gaya. I think this change should probably be submitted to tanach.us.

 

Here's the second instance in verse 7. With some imagination, you can see a faint line with the size and shape of the other gayas. But the faint trace is indistinguishable from the adjacent faint blobs it merges into. Lm clearly has it. The printed and digital editions do not have a gaya, but BHK1-2 and Koren have it. Interestingly BHK3 (1963) does not have it, and they had the manuscript.

 

 

[99asteroids]

Finally, L has a clear gaya in the third instance in verse 8. All the editions have it. Lm clearly has gayas for all three. Only BHK3 really seems to follow what's ready apparent in the color photos of L, but I like to dream that there's a faded-away gaya in the second instance, because it doesn't make sense that he'd omit it in that one case. לָרָקִיַע only occurs two other times, in Ezekiel 1:25-26, and there are no gayas there in L, so who knows.

 

 

[99asteroids]

And here's דֶּשֶׁא

[99asteroids]

B 93, if it really is by Samuel ben Jacob, doesn't have any gayas there.

[Ben Denckla]

Interesting and exciting stuff. Just to be clear, your premise here is that uncertainties one manuscript (L) can be resolved (or at least the uncertainty can be reduced) by looking at what's present in another manuscript by the same scribe. That is not a bad premise, but it is also not one that everyone will agree with. For example, I would be surprised if the maintainer of tanach.us would accept such a premise.

 

By the way, just to be clear, the premise is that the pointing-scribe (naqdan) was the same. Who the letter-scribe (sofer) was, or whether it was the same person as the pointing-scribe, is irrelevant here since we are only talking about points not letters.

 

With respect to an edition like MAM, this premise is irrelevant: if we believe an additional manuscript is high-quality, it is of interest to MAM, regardless of whether it is by SbJ or not. An additional manuscript is particularly relevant to MAM in the missing sections of the Aleppo Codex, which of course include Genesis and indeed almost all of Torah.

[99asteroids]

@Ben Denckla SbJ was the sofer and the naqdan on both L and Lm (aka Gottheil 14). We know this because he says so in the colophon of each manuscript. He also wrote the masora of both. He was a one-man show, at least in these two manuscripts. That's unusual for these old manuscripts and compelling. If they had who knows who doing the pointing or letters across the two manuscripts, I wouldn't even bother. So I think that if we could use a second opinion on L's ambiguities, it seems that another manuscript by SbJ would be preferable to one by a different scribe in a different era with different habits and idiosyncracies. If we found another partial manuscript pointed by ben Asher that could fill in some Torah and missing Psalms and clarify some of the pages we do have in Aleppo but with nearly illegible text, would you rather use that as a backup reference to verify and/or reconstruct Aleppo or L? Oh, and we have a third manuscript of Genesis also written and pointed by him, although it only begins with chapter 2. Whether the B 93 fragments are his consonants and pointing are unknown because we don't have the colophon, but it seems he was in the habit of doing all his own work. 

 

There is one item above I think you might agree with. The first לָרָקִיַע in 1:7 clearly has a gaya in L, and I never even noticed it until I compared it with Lm. Tanach and MAM might want to consider adding that gaya, not I that I care much about them anymore.

 

And on that thought, I would love to have a Tanakh that doesn't slavishly follow a single manuscript in diplomatic fashion. I'd love one that that has clear rules on when and where gayas will show up and sticks with it, regardless of the manuscripts. BHK3 actually attempted this gaya feat (as stated in its preface), which also makes it an unreliable reference check for L. (It blows my mind that they had possession of L but clearly admit in the preface that they departed from it whenever they felt like it and didn't always note it; their aim was for L to be the basis, not necessarily to make a truly diplomatic edition, unlike the BHS crew who really did strive for a diplomatic edition.) And I'd love a Tanakh that doesn't feel obligated to reproduce clear errors just for the sake of being diplomatic. That's why I treasure my BHL. Maybe we could say that the Masoretic project isn't over yet. It's almost done, but we just need to sort out a few final details and make a manuscript everyone can agree on. And maybe you'll be involved in that project. It's a nice daydream. 

[Ben Denckla]

11 hours ago, 99asteroids said:

I think that if we could use a second opinion on L's ambiguities, it seems that another manuscript by SbJ would be preferable to one by a different scribe in a different era with different habits and idiosyncrasies.

If another manuscript is to be used to help decode L, certainly it is preferable that that manuscript be by L's scribe (SbJ). I was just trying to be a bit contrarian and point out that the whole idea of using another manuscript to help decode L is not something everyone would accept.

 

Personally, after working on tanach.us for a few years (on and off, not full-time), I am somewhat soured on the whole idea of strictly diplomatic editions. They may have made more sense in the past when, for technological reasons, a photo-facsimile of a manuscript was not as easy to distribute as a diplomatic edition. But I also think they are based on a fundamentally dubious premise, independent of the technological limitations of 20th-century publishing.

 

That dubious premise is that a manuscript written by a human and degraded over the course of a millennium can be completely decoded. Here L's much-vaunted completeness has done us a disservice, strangely enough. The editors of BHS were unable to resist the seductive allure of trying to create an edition that was all of the following:

• strictly diplomatic
• complete
• somewhat useful, for practical purposes (e.g. you could actually chant from it)

To be contrarian again: if L is so unclear in some places that you need to resort to Gottheil 14 to decode it ... maybe you should just put a tiny question mark where that gaʿya might or might not be. And note that Gottheil 14 has a gaʿya there. Or don't create a diplomatic edition of L. Create an edition "in the style of SbJ" (assuming you have enough SbJ manuscripts to cover the Tanakh with a reasonable level of certainty).

 

A BHS-style transcription, in its effort to be complete, always has to make a decision to either have a gaʿya or not. Notes are the saving grace of such an edition, but:

• I don't think BHS acknowledges even a small portion of the great number of uncertainties in L.
• Most users will ignore the notes.
• Many users don't even have the opportunity to ignore the notes, because they use BHS derivatives that have had the notes stripped out.

This is why I make my suggestion of a tiny question mark used to indicate a dubious gaʿya. My suggestion is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but not totally. My point is that acknowledgement of the uncertainty needs to be "baked in," front and center. And publishing a question-mark-stripped derivative of this "uncertainty-forward" edition would be against the license (or terms of use) of that edition. (BTW I have always wondered: by what agreement (I assume there was an agreement?!) with GBS (DBG) was WLC published?)

 

In my work on tanach.us, the issue of the permissibility of the use of context often came up. When this issue came up, I was always on the side of using context to decode L, instead of restricting ourselves (or pretending to restrict ourselves) to the images of the manuscript alone. So, I am not a purist on this point. Another manuscript by SbJ is a kind of context, although not one we ever considered. But the main reason I advocated for the use of context was that I was still in the thrall of the dubious premise that one could create an edition of L that was:

• strictly diplomatic
• complete
• somewhat useful, for practical purposes (e.g. you could actually chant from it)

A secondary reason I advocated for the use of context was that, regardless of the wisdom of the premise of BHS, that was the premise upon which BHS was created, so it was bound to produce an uneven edition, if we started having a different editorial policy than BHS, without a huge overhaul of all 929 chapters of Tanakh.

Edited June 1 by Ben Denckla

[Ben Denckla]

11 hours ago, 99asteroids said:

If we found another partial manuscript pointed by ben Asher that could fill in some Torah and missing Psalms and clarify some of the pages we do have in Aleppo but with nearly illegible text, would you rather use that as a backup reference to verify and/or reconstruct Aleppo or L?

A ben Asher manuscript would certainly be great to (attempt to) reconstruct missing sections of the Aleppo. To what extent it could/should be used to resolve uncertainties in extant sections of the Aleppo... well that's the question. The answer to that question somewhat depends on whether you're "selling" this hypothetical edition as a strictly diplomatic edition of the Aleppo, or as an edition "in the ben Asher style."

Edited June 1 by Ben Denckla

[Ben Denckla]

11 hours ago, 99asteroids said:

There is one item above I think you might agree with. The first לָרָקִיַע in 1:7 clearly has a gaya in L, and I never even noticed it until I compared it with Lm. Tanach[.us] and MAM might want to consider adding that gaya [...]

 

Wait I'm confused... you think there's a clear gaʿya under ל in the image below? I'll concede that:

• There's some ink-remains there, where a gaʿya would be.
• A gaʿya is permissible there. I have no idea whether it is anything more than permissible, e.g. whether it is expected. But let's even say I concede it is expected.
• The presence of this gaʿya in Gottheil 14 lends particular credence to the idea that, whether or not it is expected in general, this gaʿya would be expected in an SbJ-style manuscript.

 

But all that doesn't add up to clarity, for me at least.

 

It adds up to being of interest to MAM, but more for its presence in Gottheil 14 than its possible presence in L.

 

It adds up to being perhaps worthy of a note on tanach.us, but probably not an actual change to the main text.

 

Edited June 1 by Ben Denckla

[99asteroids]

Good observations, Ben.

 

Btw, I'm contemplating using Koren's gayas for my Scriptura project. The reason I'm interested in Koren is that it's liturgically functional. In fact, it's what the Hebrew-speaking Catholic Churches in Israel use (there are just a few; one of them is in Jerusalem and is called House of Sts. Simeon and Anne). So my Catholic brothers and sisters use it, and that's meaningful to me. But I'm not sure I can use the whole text as my basis because it still seems to be part of the RB2 tradition. Also, for all the pointing helps they provide, they still don't distinguish yerach ben yomo. But at least their gaya approach isn't reckless and insane, lol. It seems to follow grammatical rules. 

[Ben Denckla]

12 hours ago, 99asteroids said:

And on that thought, I would love to have a Tanakh that doesn't slavishly follow a single manuscript in diplomatic fashion. I'd love one that that has clear rules on when and where gayas will show up and sticks with it, regardless of the manuscripts. [...] And I'd love a Tanakh that doesn't feel obligated to reproduce clear errors just for the sake of being diplomatic. That's why I treasure my BHL. Maybe we could say that the Masoretic project isn't over yet. It's almost done, but we just need to sort out a few final details and make a manuscript everyone can agree on. And maybe you'll be involved in that project. It's a nice daydream. 

 

That is the dream! As un-humble as it may seem, I'd like to think that we (who work on MAM and other reader-friendly editions like Koren and Simanim) are trying to wrap up certain areas of unfinished business in the Masoretic project. It is possible that in some cases the Masoretes viewed these things not as unfinished business but rather as too minor to worry about. For instance, distinguishing paseq from legarmeih. Maybe it just seemed super-obvious to them and/or they assumed (correctly?) that it was super-obvious to their intended audience (which was who, by the way?). I find it more of a stretch that they really thought gaʿya was finished business though.

Edited June 1 by Ben Denckla

[Brian K. Mitchell]

3 hours ago, 99asteroids said:

It seems to follow grammatical rules. 

 

Yes, the Koren Tanakh is said to follow rules set out by וולף היידנהיים and I think also those of ידידיה נורצי .

[Brian K. Mitchell]

Not sure if these images are going to be any different but here are some images from Accordance's L module zoomed all the way in:

 

image one

 

image two

 

image three

 

 

 

[99asteroids]

Thank you so much, @Brian K. Mitchell! You saved me $129 plus tax! I really appreciate you taking the time. These images are basically the same resolution as what's on Sefaria and Archive.

[Brian K. Mitchell]

Just for fun here's a manuscript from 1141 by the scribe Yoseph ben Yacob:

[Brian K. Mitchell]

I almost forgot! there are a few more editions of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible ) based on the Leningrad codex!

 

The first image is of the JPS Bilingual Tanakh (1999). This text took the 1987 'Michigan-Claremont-Westminster' (edited/proofread by Emanuel Tov) and then updated the MCW by looking at the Revision of the BHS, recent photographs, and making several in-house changes. 

 

 

 

And this one by The Bible Society in Israel (1991) which also used the MCW text but made different changes.

 

Regards