Aleppo Codex-IAC Training Video

The next artifact we're going to look at is a copy of the Jerusalem Crown Bible.

Now, this is a very special Bible.

I'm going to turn it like that.

As you can see, it's actually backwards from a normal bookbinding because Hebrew is written from right

to left and this is a very special Bible.

It's based on a much older manuscript called the Aleppo Codex.

Now, the Aleppo Codex was written in the 10th century AD by a group of scribes known as the Masoretes.

And these scribes, like modern Jewish scribes, took very special care when writing down the copies

of scriptures that they were making.

They had certain rules for the types of materials they could use for the columns.

They had a special ritual for when they would write the name of God.

They had all these different types of rituals.

They even had methods of counting the letters to make sure that they didn't miss anything.

And all of these things were done to ensure that they were copying the Word of God

accurately.

So this is a really helpful tool when talking about the reliability of the Bible because of the accuracy with which the

Masoretes copied the scriptures.

So I'm going to set that here and we can open it up and take a look at what it looks like on the inside.

Here we can actually see there are little markings at the bottom of each of the words

and these are vowel markings.

Now the Masoretes, the scribes that wrote down the Aleppo Codex, they were the ones

that invented these little vowel markings because they were worried that because Hebrew

was becoming more of an extinct language at the time, that people would forget how to pronounce the words.

And so what they did is they created these vowel markings and put them under the letters of the

Hebrew words.