Writings: JudaismThe Leningrad Codex4 of 10

Writings: Judaism

The Leningrad Codex

The Leningrad Codex is a complete Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, with vowels, accents, and notes, written by one scribe, Samuel ben Jacob. Its colophon dates it in five calendar systems, and Ben Outhwaite of Cambridge reads 1008 to 1009 CE. It is the base text of the third Biblia Hebraica and later editions, and is in Russia's National Library.

Last reviewed:

Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    about 1300 BCE, for the giving of the Torah at Sinai (the Orthodox Union, an Orthodox body, says it was given "some thirty three hundred years ago" on a page dated 21 June 2006; the year is computed here from that phrase and the page's date stamp, because the page states no year of its own; the Orthodox Union is the only voice consulted that dates the giving, and the date applies to the giving only; it also says the Men of the Great Assembly determined the Tanakh's composition, an event no statement consulted dates; its glossary entry on the Tanakh, the Encyclopaedia Judaica's article on Orthodoxy, the Conservative statement Emet Ve-Emunah (1988), and the Reform statement of 1999, as consulted, give no year)

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    about the 10th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE, for the Torah's sources (Christine Hayes of Yale, in a lecture: the documentary hypothesis, which she calls a major hypothesis that is not without criticism, assigns its sources relative dates, not absolute dates, and dates the earliest Torah source, J, to about the 10th century BCE; other scholars date all of it after the fifth century BCE, in the fourth or third; she says the last book of the Tanakh was written in the 160s BCE and all the books were probably organized in some way by the end of the 1st century CE; this bar marks the writing of the Torah's sources, as the tradition's bar marks the giving of the Torah)

  3. This copy made

    about 1008 to 1009 CE, on Ben Outhwaite's reading of the colophon (the colophon gives the year in five systems; Ben Outhwaite's equivalents run from 1008 to 1011 CE in his 2016 article and from 1006 to 1014 CE in a later one; in 2016 he writes that 1008 to 1009 seems encompassed by most of the figures, and in the later article that it seems reasonable)

  4. This copy found

    Not a find: the codex was made in Egypt about 1008 to 1009 CE for a private owner, passed through other owners, and later drew the notice of the collector Abraham Firkovich, who died in 1874 (an added note records a sale in 1135 CE, by Ben Outhwaite's reading). It is now catalogued in the Firkovich collection. The sources used give no year or place for Firkovich's acquisition and no year for its arrival in the Imperial Library in St Petersburg.

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

The Leningrad Codex is a complete Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, on parchment leaves bound as a codex, a book of pages rather than a scroll.1 One scribe, Samuel ben Jacob, wrote its consonants, vowels, accents, and Masorah. The Masorah is the set of notes in which the Masoretes, Jewish scholars who preserved how the text is spelled and read, recorded their rulings.23 It also has carpet pages, decorated pages with tiny writing, called micrography, that name the scribe and his patron.12

Ben Outhwaite of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit calls it the earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible. Its text is the base of Kittel's third Biblia Hebraica, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Biblia Hebraica Quinta, and the online Westminster Leningrad Codex, among the most widely used scholarly editions.1

How the copy was dated

The scribe dated the work himself. His colophon, a note about a book's making, on folio 1r gives the month, Sivan. It gives the year in five systems: 4770 from Creation, 1444 from the exile of King Jehoiachin, 1319 of the Seleucid era, 940 from the destruction of the Second Temple, and 399 of the Hijra, the Islamic calendar.12

Outhwaite's 2016 article equates these to 1010, 1011, 1008, 1008 to 1009, and 1008 to 1009 CE, and says none matches another exactly. It says 1008 to 1009 seems to be encompassed by most of the figures.2 His later article gives 1010, 1006 to 1014, 1008, 1008 to 1010, and 1009. There he writes that 1008 to 1009 seems reasonable, as it comes closest to the Seleucid, Destruction, and Hijra figures.1 The colophon names the place, in his reading, as Fustat, which was still Egypt's administrative center. Other translators read Cairo.1

Outhwaite finds other evidence that fits. Documents in the Cairo Genizah, a storeroom of discarded Jewish writings, name a Samuel ben Jacob as scribe in 1009 CE and witness in 1002 CE. A contract of 1021 has him agree to copy more Bible books for 25 dinars.12 See how ancient texts are dated.

The text: its date and authorship

The strip above marks the Torah, the five books of Moses, not this copy or the rest of the Tanakh. The tradition's bar marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai, in a year computed here from the Orthodox Union's statement, on a page dated 2006, that it was given some 3,300 years ago. The Conservative and Reform statements consulted give no year. The scholars' bar spans the dates Christine Hayes reports for the Torah's sources.

The tradition's view, with Shapiro's report of Jewish law

This column draws on statements of Jewish movements and on a reference work, which name no codex. The Orthodox Union, an Orthodox body, says the Torah was given at Sinai some 3,300 years ago. It says the Men of the Great Assembly determined the composition of the Tanakh under the influence of the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh).45 The Encyclopaedia Judaica reports that the Orthodox school of Torah im derekh erets (Torah with secular education) held the Masoretic text, the text the Masoretes preserved, to be an authentic record of divine communication of content.6

Marc Shapiro writes that Jewish law allows only the plain letters in a Torah scroll, which almost makes a codex necessary for the Masoretes' vowels and notes.3 The Conservative movement's 1988 statement describes several views of revelation. Reform's 1999 statement calls Torah God's ongoing revelation.78

Scholars of the Tanakh's text: Hayes and Tov

Christine Hayes of Yale says in a lecture that the documentary hypothesis, which she calls a major hypothesis that is not without criticism, dates the earliest Torah source, J, to about the tenth century BCE. She adds that other scholars date all of it after the fifth century BCE.9 She holds that the Torah probably reached fixed authority first, then the Prophets, then the Writings, and that probably by the end of the first century all were organized in some way. She adds that Dead Sea Scrolls, some from the fourth and third centuries BCE, show a high degree of correspondence with later manuscripts.10

Emanuel Tov holds that the archetype of the proto-Masoretic text, its consonants, was not formed at one time. He proposes that its three sections were fixed in stages, together with the fixing of their content.11

How it was found

This is not a find. Samuel ben Jacob made it for Mevorak ben Joseph, known as Ibn Yazdad ha-Kohen, who commissioned it. Outhwaite reads the family as probably Persian Karaites.12 The Karaite Korner website says Karaites hold Karaism to be the original form of Judaism and reject later additions to the Tanakh, such as the Rabbinic Oral Law, which the Orthodox Union says was given to Moses at Sinai.1314

A note added over a hundred years later records that in 1135 CE another owner sold it to Masliah ha-Kohen, head of the Palestinian yeshiva, a Jewish academy.12 Outhwaite writes that, as far as is known, it was never discarded into the Genizah. A Biblical Archaeology Review footnote says several sources place it there and judges that highly unlikely.215

It later drew the notice of the Karaite collector Abraham Firkovich, who died in 1874. The sources used here give no year or place for his acquisition.2 His collections went to the Imperial Library in St Petersburg, the first in 1862 and 1870 and the second after his death.16

The Encyclopaedia Judaica says that, to support his case about Karaite history, Firkovich fabricated colophons and falsified some tombstone inscriptions. It reports that Harkavy, Strack, Frankl, and Kunik held that his collections abounded in forgeries, and that D. Chwolson, whom it calls his most sympathetic critic, acknowledged the general unreliability of his manuscripts. It also says his manuscript collection is considered one of the most valuable collections of Hebrew manuscripts in the world, and that well-known scholars used the manuscripts. The entry does not mention this codex, and the sources used here report no challenge to its colophon and carry no Karaite community statement on Firkovich.16

What it shows, and what it does not

The evidence shows that a complete Tanakh with vowels, accents, and Masorah was copied in Egypt by one scribe, in 1008 to 1009 CE on Outhwaite's reading. A carpet page reads, in Outhwaite's translation, Samuel ben Jacob wrote, vocalised and furnished with masora this codex of the Bible2.2 Kim Phillips reads a colophon as showing that Samuel revered Ben Asher's work and tried to align his own with it.17

Neriah Klein of the Hebrew University Bible Project, whose edition of the Hebrew Bible uses the Aleppo Codex as its base text, counts about 120 places in the Torah where the codex departs from the Masorah, against three in the Aleppo Codex. Most of the Aleppo Codex's Torah is lost, and Klein does not say how its count is checked.183

It does not show the text before the Middle Ages, or settle how close the codex is to Ben Asher's own text. In the preface to the third Biblia Hebraica, Paul Kahle wrote that he and Rudolf Kittel had hoped to replace it with the Aleppo Codex, but that its owners would not allow a photographic copy.19 Mordechai Breuer, quoted by Phillips, held that Kahle did Ben Asher an injustice by calling it Ben Asher's text, while Aaron Dotan held that it matches his tradition.17

See also

Sources

  1. Benjamin M. Outhwaite (University of Cambridge). Beyond the Leningrad Codex: Samuel b. Jacob in the Cairo Genizah. University of Cambridge repository (author's PDF; the PDF names no journal; a footnote's access date of 13 December 2017 shows it was written in or after 2017), p. 1, pp. 3 to 4 (the colophon and its translation), n. 10, pp. 8 to 9 (the dating), and n. 92 on p. 19. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  2. Ben Outhwaite (Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library). Samuel ben Jacob: the Leningrad Codex B19a and T-S 10J5.15. Fragment of the Month, January 2016, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, 2016, the whole article. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  3. Marc B. Shapiro (Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies, University of Scranton). That in Aleppo Once (review of Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider, Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex, Jewish Publication Society, 2010). Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2011, 2011, the whole review. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  4. OU Staff. Torah. Orthodox Union, 2006. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  5. Orthodox Union. Tanakh (Judaism 101 glossary). Orthodox Union, glossary entry. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  6. Walter S. Wurzburger; Emanuel Rackman. Orthodoxy. Encyclopaedia Judaica (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  7. Commission on the Philosophy of Conservative Judaism. Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, The Rabbinical Assembly, and The United Synagogue of America, 1988, printed pages 18 to 26. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  8. Central Conference of American Rabbis. A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism. Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1999, Torah. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  9. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 5: Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12-50. Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript, first chapter (Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis). Accessed 2026-10-29.
  10. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 1: The Parts of the Whole. Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  11. Emanuel Tov. The Formation of the (Proto-)Masoretic Text. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 9, no. 3 (2020), pp. 306 to 319 (abstract in the Orion bibliography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), 2020, the abstract only. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  12. Ben Outhwaite (Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library). The first owners of the Leningrad Codex: T-S 10J30.7. Fragment of the Month, November 2017, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, 2017, the whole article. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  13. Karaite Korner. What is Karaite Judaism. Karaite Korner (a Karaite Jewish website), home page summary. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  14. Orthodox Union. Oral Law (Judaism 101 glossary). Orthodox Union, glossary entry. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  15. Biblical Archaeology Review (footnote 4 to 'The Leningrad Codex'). Footnote 4: The Leningrad Codex. Biblical Archaeology Society Library, the footnote. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  16. Haggai Ben-Shammai (2nd ed.). Firkovich, Abraham. Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed., Gale), via Encyclopedia.com, the whole entry. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  17. Kim Phillips. A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex: L17. Tyndale Bulletin 68, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1 to 29, 2017, pp. 21 and 28. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  18. Neriah Klein (Head of the Text and Masora sections of the Hebrew University Bible Project), interviewed by the Genizah Research Unit. Q&A Wednesday: The Best Crown in Town? Finding the Aleppo Codex in Fustat, with Neriah Klein. Genizah Fragments blog, Cambridge University Library Genizah Research Unit, 27 April 2022, 2022, the whole interview. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  19. Biblical Archaeology Review (sidebar 'Leningrad vs. Aleppo'; the author is not printed on the saved page). Leningrad vs. Aleppo. Biblical Archaeology Society Library, 2008, the whole sidebar. Accessed 2026-11-06.