Tracing the History of the Bible One Book at a Time

Since 1958, some of the world’s best Bible scholars have worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Bible Project to come up with an authoritative critical edition of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. Using the ninth-century C.E. Aleppo Codex,^* the oldest extant version of the complete Hebrew Bible, as a baseline, these scholars are tracking how and in what ways the Biblical text has changed over the course of centuries and millennia. They compare the Aleppo Codex text with earlier Biblical manuscripts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Torah and early Greek and Latin translations, to identify places where the words of the Hebrew Bible have been changed, altered, omitted or simply misspelled. But it is also an agonizingly slow process. In the five and half decades since the project began, three Biblical books have been published, with a fourth set to appear in the coming year. If the pace is maintained, the complete critical edition will appear sometime after 2210.

* Harvey Minkoff, “The Aleppo Codex,” Bible Review, August 1991.

Learn more about the Bible Project.

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