Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tigran Aivazian <tigran AT bibles.org.uk>]

Greetings Peter,

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005, Peter Kirk wrote:
> You ignore the best evidence - apparently Aleppo as well in the 
> evidence you quoted - and concentrate on differences between late derivative 
> copies of that best evidence.

No, that is not quite true, although it is right to say that what I 
actually _quoted_ (i.e. listed) indeed contained only the printed 
editions. But the data I examine is based on the collation (sometimes 
complete!) of the SEVENTY ancient manuscripts, some of which (e.g. Or. 4445 
and Codex Beth of the Prophets) much more ancient than either Leningrad 
and Aleppo Codices.

However, for the lack of space on a page (as I construct an edition to be 
read every day and not to sit on a shelf as an Encyclopaedia) I do not 
actually list individual manuscripts (though I could do that, in a 
separate edition that will be designed for that very purpose, to record 
_detailed_ data of this sort) and only record printed editions, but only 
_according_ to the way they agree with those ancient manuscripts.

> I think that your work will still be in progress and far from complete until 
> it includes all variations in the Leningrad and Aleppo texts.

There is nothing stopping some volunteer (you and anyone are welcome to 
join :) to include all such variations. I will gladly accept the patches.
Now, as I said, there is no space on a page to record all the data from 
all those 70 manuscripts. But, okay, Leningrad and Aleppo are special 
enough to make an exception for these two.

Btw, speaking of Leningrad Codex, it is actually on my list of things TODO 
to generate the differences automatically as I can use Kirk Lowery's 
electronic text I have (which I converted to Tiqwah encoding and also 
typeset as PDF available at http://www.bibles.org.uk/pdf/bibles/Hebrew). 
So, at least for Leningrad Codex the task is not that hard and should be 
doable in the near future. (everyone who reads this can consider it a 
"call for volunteers" --- the environment for work is already set up and 
an ssh account will be provided whereby you can help with the task Peter 
mentioned)

As for Aleppo, I have seen electronic (meaning machine-readable, not just 
scanned facsimiles) versions thereof (one even produced by one of my 
students :) but I am not sure if they are 100% reliable, so to include all 
variants from Aleppo may be a lot more work...

In summary, thank you Peter for your opinion on my work --- it is 
constructive and lead me to some ideas for future work that are quite 
reasonable and should be doable.

Shalom
Tigran