Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dr. Joel M. Hoffman" <joel AT exc.com>]

>A computerized count of the number of consonants in the normal + kethib 
>sections of the Torah books of the WLC Tanach is 304,848. The Koren 
>edition of the Torah (Torah, Nevi'im, uKetuvim [Jerusalem: Koren, 1962]) 
>has 304,805 consonants (see "The Bible 'Codes': A Textual Perspective, 
>Jeffrey H Tigay, University of Pennsylvania, October 13, 1999 
>http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/codetext.html , reference 5. ). Thus 
>the Koren edition has 43 fewer consonants than the WLC. (A 0.01441% 
>difference.)

There is more than one "official" version of Tanach, not all of them
based on the Leningrad Codex.  For example, the widely-used Mandelkern
concordance is based on an older rabbinic version of the Tanach (and,
as such, lists spellings not to be found in our texts).  My guess is
that Koren, too, is not based directly on Leningrad.

Do you have word counts for each book?  If you knew where the
differences were, I suppose you could pay a graduation student to find
them....

-Joel