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Saturday, 23 November 2024

Comparing the Leningrad codex with the Aleppo

 I have been grateful for tanach.us for making available the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) online these past several years. Earlier on I had to compare it with images of the Aleppo Codex. This is a very trying job indeed. My old eyes could hardly do it now! But someone has transcribed the Aleppo Codex as I understand it at mgketer.org. I am no expert, but as I hear the errors in the WLC in the te'amim, I can find and correct them by hand in the Text. 

It's not just the extra metegs as I have yammered on about before, but recently as I have looked through nearly 100 psalms at this point, I have found other transformations of mercha and tifha into silluq that bring down the melody to far to e rather than f# or g in the psalms. I have found 32 verses with one or other type of error in the last week alone. Sometimes the silluq just isn't there. It has been introduced in the WLC, and sometimes it is mercha or tifha in the Aleppo that turned into a silluq in the WLC. Silluq is a short vertical line and mercha and tifha are just slightly off the vertical. It would be easy to copy it wrong.

I have formatted 32 psalms in the period giving an error rate of almost one per psalm, but sometimes 0 and sometimes 3 in one psalm. E.g. Psalm 68, verses 8, 20, and 24 illustrate the classes of error.

Verse 8 WLC

should be 
and verse 20 WLC

should be

and verse 24 WLC

should be


I think this should be a quiz. 
  • In verse 8, it is a spurious silluq. בִֽישִׁימ֣וֹן 
  • In verse 20, יַֽעֲמָס should read יַעֲמָס without an accent since it is joined to the next word by hyphen (which I omit in the music), and it takes its recitation pitch from the mercha on the prior word.
  • In verse 24, תִּֽמְחַ֥ץ should be  תִּ֥מְחַ֥ץ. Notice here that two sub-lineal accents are required on the word, the first to direct the pitch to the right note and the second to show accentuation.


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