Biblical Hebrew Forum

["John Richards" <jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk>]

The Jewish Network site at www.shamash.org/tanach/ has a link to a "fully
voweled and punctuated Torah text according to the Allepo (sic) Codex which
is in HTML4 RTL text." It also mentions "The rest of the Bible is in
preparation."

Is this the famous Aleppo Sephardim synagogue codex, referred to in the
Prefaces to the printed BHS?

According to the third Preface (by Paul Kahle) , "Rudolf Kittel and I had
hoped to be able to replace the Leningrad MS. L, which was used as the basis
of the Biblia Hebraica in the course of our work, with the model codex of
Ben Asher himself which is kept in the synagogue of the Shephardim in
Aleppo. That has not been possible since the owners of the codex would not
hear of a photographic copy."

Admittedly this was written in 1937, but I was unaware that the situation
had changed. (Perhaps my copy of the BHS is out of date. It is the 7th
edition.) If the situation has changed, is the Aleppo codex in fact that
much better than the Leningrad text? And is the Mechon Mamre etext, which
the link referred to above leads to, critical and accurate, does anyone
know?

John Richards