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A Precious Bible Treasure in Leningrad

IT BEGAN as an ordinary sight-seeing tour from Finland. While in Leningrad, the visitor and his wife had no great hopes of experiencing anything special in regard to the Bible, for the travel bureau’s instruction booklet stated: “Bringing religious literature into the country is forbidden.” Yet it was in this city that he had the greatest thrill of his life regarding the Bible as a book.

There are many church buildings in Leningrad, but only a handful of them serve the purpose for which they were built. Many of them have been turned into museums. This includes the towering St. Isaac’s Cathedral that reminds one of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The most enlightening presentation of the official attitude toward religion is to be found at the Kazan Cathedral on Leningrad’s main avenue, Nevski Prospekt. This stately cathedral has been converted into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. In the basement the display of religious history advances in chronological order down to the present day. A person can see the instruments of torture used during the time of the Inquisition. Especially impressive is the scene of an Inquisition court trial, with life-size wax models. The unhappy victim is chained and is on his knees before his accusers and monks dressed in black robes. The executioner stands by, ready for action.

Opposite the Kazan Cathedral, on the other side of Nevski Prospekt, is the largest bookstore in the city. On the second floor, the Finnish visitors saw many pictures and slogans that seemingly were designed to encourage the reader to reject religion. One poster depicted fish in the shape of old women with scarves on their heads. These fish were being lured by the “ticket to the Kingdom of heaven” that was attached to a hook labeled “Sects.”

Continuing down Nevski Prospekt to the east and turning to the right just before the statue of Catherine the Great, the visitors found themselves in front of the famous Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library. This library is the second largest in the Soviet Union and one of the biggest in the world, containing more than 17 million items. When the visitor inquired about the manuscript, a library official raised a series of polite, searching questions. Then this official disappeared, shortly to return with a reddish-brown box. He set it on the table and opened the lid. There it was​—the Leningrad Codex from the year 1008 (or, 1009). But what is this manuscript, and why is it so valuable?

THE LENINGRAD CODEX

Would you be interested in seeing a manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures that serves as a basic text for Bible translations? This is what the Leningrad Codex is all about.

But you may wonder: Were not the Hebrew Scriptures completed before Christ? How could this text be from as late as the year 1008? To understand this matter better, we need to know a little about the Masoretes.

The Masoretes (in Hebrew, Baalei Hamasorah, “Lords of Tradition”) lived in the centuries after Christ and were extremely accurate copyists of the Hebrew Scriptures. They made no alterations in the text but, instead, noted the changes made by earlier scribes and called attention to these in the margin of the Hebrew text. They also invented a system of vowel points and accent marks to aid the reader in arriving at the correct pronunciation. In view of the meticulous care of the Masoretes, their text is indeed suitable for translating the Bible, even though it is more than 1,000 years removed from the original text. A comparison with far earlier texts, such as the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, confirms the accuracy of the Masoretic text.

However, no individual manuscript is completely reliable, because copyists did make errors. That is why Hebrew editions began to be made, based on a comparison of different manuscripts. In 1906, for example, the German scholar Rudolf Kittel published his famous Biblia Hebraica, or, Hebrew Bible. As a basis, he used Jacob ben Chayyim’s Masoretic text. Additionally, in his footnotes he compared the readings of many other manuscripts.

Ben Chayyim’s text was from as late as 1524-25 C.E. Kittel, together with his successor, German professor Paul Kahle, zealously sought to get hold of older Masoretic texts. There was an excellent Masoretic text in the synagogue of the Sephardim in Aleppo, Syria. It was compiled by the famous Ben Asher family and was prepared about the year 930 C.E. But this manuscript could not be used because, as Professor Kahle said, “the owners of the codex would not hear of a photographic copy,” for fear of its being desecrated and their being cursed.

Still, there was another Masoretic text based on the work of the Ben Asher family. It contained the entire Hebrew Scriptures, and, in fact, the decision had been made to use it as the basis for the third edition of the Biblia Hebraica. It had been copied in Old Cairo in 1008 (or, 1009) from the corrected clear books prepared by the master Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher, as the copyist Samuel ben Jacob himself mentions. Its owners did not ‘fear being cursed’ for having the Bible copied, as did the owners of the Aleppo Codex. They loaned their manuscript to Kittel and Kahle for two years. This manuscript is the very Codex B 19-A that is now preserved in the Leningrad Public Library.

MAY I PHOTOGRAPH IT?

The Leningrad Codex, a manuscript in book form, is now in loose sheets. Because it had been microfilmed, the binding is now undone. The sheets are approximately of quarto size, only wider, and feel like very thick paper, almost like thin cardboard. The edges of some of the pages are worn, but the text itself, written in three columns, is sharp and clear.

“May I photograph this manuscript?” asked the visitor. The library official disappeared again into an inner room and returned with an affirmative reply. The visitor piled a few sturdy volumes from the nearby bookshelf in front of the nearest window, placed his pocket tripod with the camera on top and selected the second sheet from the manuscript pile for the photograph.

The visitor found it of interest to note that God’s name, the Tetragrammaton (Jehovah, or, Yahweh) appeared several times on this sheet, starting from what is now referred to as Genesis 2:4. The divine name appears 6,960 times in the Hebrew Scriptures. This certainly does not speak well of those Bible translators who substitute for it the word “Lord.”

At the end of the tour the library official showed the visitors several rare manuscripts in glass cases. Included was the famous Ostromir Gospel, the oldest surviving dated manuscript in Russian (Old Bulgarian), from the year 1056.

It is certainly a pleasant surprise that such a precious manuscript as the Leningrad Codex is carefully preserved in a country that prohibits the free importation of Bibles. The manuscript involved is not just one of many but the very one that has furnished the basis for many modern translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, including the New World Translation published by the Watch Tower Society.