Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #249 - Ginsburg's Lost Masorah: Part 1, Nehemia Gordon sits down with Dr. David Moster, Director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, to trace the remarkable detective story behind his peer-reviewed article "A Chance Discovery." Together they unpack the world of Christian David Ginsburg, who became the unlikely founder of modern Masoretic studies, and reveal how a four-volume, 2,500-page monument of biblical scholarship turned out to be hiding a secret in plain sight!

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Transcript

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today once again with Dr David Moster. He is the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the JTS, in New York. He’s also the director of the Institute for Biblical Culture. David, what is the Biblical Hebrew Program at JTS at the Jewish Theological Seminary? Does somebody have to be a student at JTS to participate in that?

David: No, we actually created it for anyone and everyone. It’s all on Zoom; it’s for people at different levels. Right now, for example, we’re running 10 courses with 150 different people, and they are at levels beginning with the Aleph–Bet, reading to learn, and then we have in our more advanced classes, people reading four or five, six chapters of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, at one time.

Nehemia: Wow.

David: So, we really have from Aleph to Tav, not A to Z, we have from Aleph to Tav, all at the same time. It’s all on Zoom, and everyone is welcome to check out our website at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Nehemia: So, I’ll just share a little story about that. We had a member of what we call our Scholar Club write through my website and contact Lynell and say, “I’m looking for a biblical Hebrew program.” So, I told her to ask you, and now she’s taking it. She’s about to sign up for it. So, she’s like, “Wait a minute, why wouldn’t I do this? This is online. I’m going to learn something here.” She went to Israel and did the Aleph program about two or three years ago. Well, it was actually 2023, just before the war. So, she was there for six weeks at Hebrew University, very intense, but she hasn’t been able to get back to it. So, she’s going to do the online course. What is JTS, for those who don’t know? It’s actually a flagship of Jewish learning.

David: It’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. It’s on Broadway and 122nd Street in New York.

Nehemia: You’re such a New Yorker. That means nothing to most of my audience.

David: It’s the upper, upper West Side, right near Columbia University, and it has been there for more than a hundred years. It’s a really important institution in, not only scholarship in America, Jewish scholarship, but as well, also, synagogue life and Jewish life. So, it organizes a lot of different synagogues and camps and things like that. So, it’s really a multifaceted institution.

Nehemia: It really is a flagship of Jewish learning. I would put it up there with Yeshiva University and Hebrew Union College. What is the significance of it being on Broadway? I literally don’t know why that’s important. Is there a lot of music there, or something?

David: Everybody knows Broadway, so there you go! It’s like, you know, everyone will ask you, “Where do you live?” You want to tell them you live by some kind of landmark. So, I guess we’re on Broadway.

Nehemia: So, I grew up in Chicago, and for decades after, I would meet people from like, you know, I don’t know, Skokie or Evanston, and they would say with a straight face they were from Chicago. And I’d be like, “No, you’re not. I’m really from the city.”

David: Skokie’s suburb, yeah.

Nehemia: Imean, it’s whatever, it’s like a couple miles from where I grew up, so it’s six of one, one-half dozen of the other. But if you’re from there, it’s like Broadway is important, and West Rogers Park is important. Okay, so, I wanted to ask you to come on today because you have a journal article that just came out, and it is in a journal called Sfarad, which is very interesting because Sfarad is sort of the ancient Hebrew word for Spain. I say sort of because it appears in the Tanakh, and in the Tanakh it doesn’t refer to Spain. Well, I don’t know, if it does or doesn’t is perhaps a matter of debate. But generally, it’s thought it doesn’t. But Sfarad is Spain in the Middle Ages, and it’s the modern Hebrew word. When we talk about Sephardic Jews, it means that they’re associated with the culture of Jews that were expelled from Spain in the 14th and 15th century.

It’s funny, I once had this encounter online, there was a person saying he was a Sephardic Jew, and one of these online scholars (meaning someone who doesn’t know anything) said, “Oh, what is he? His grandmother must be 500 years old. How could she be from Spain?” And I’m like, “Really, guys? Really?” Like, no, Jews whose ancestors were in Spain for some period of time, or not necessarily in Spain, were associated with Spain. You could be from Morocco as well. They are called Sephardic Jews.

All right, so I’m going to share my screen here. I’m actually going to start with that. And you have this journal article here. And a lot of times when I’m doing the interviews, it’s before the journal article comes out. So, this is actually… I think when we scheduled this, it was before the article came out, where we first discussed it. And it’s called, “The Chance Discovery: Christian David Ginsburg’s Notes on Two Historic Codices,” which, guys, it’s actually an amazing piece of modern-day detective work.

So, can we start out with, who is Christian David Ginsburg? It’s a bit of, almost like, a self-contradiction, because Ginsburg and David are Jewish names, and Christian is… I guess you couldn’t have a more Christian name. Who is Christian David Ginsburg? Why is he important for the Jewish Theological Seminary?

David: Before we get to that, I need to give a spoiler. The reason this article is in Sfarad, which is about Spanish Jewry and their descendants, is because this little detective work is going to lead to two very old ancient books that come from there. So, we’re going to get there eventually. So, that’s what the Sfarad was, really, an important key to this. Now, in terms of Christian David Ginsburg, he was a fascinating person. He was living in Warsaw. He was a rabbinical student in the late 1800s, and he basically came in contact with some Christian missionaries in Warsaw. And he started arguing with them (and I’ve rarely heard this) he actually, basically, was arguing to try and convince them to Judaism, whereas they convinced him to Christianity. And he was literally in rabbinical school, and he’s like, all of a sudden leaving rabbinical school and his life behind. He even had a kid. I imagine his whole family disowned him, and he became a believing Christian.

I originally thought that maybe he had converted to Christianity to be able to move up in society. There are cases like this in the historical record, of people who converted from Judaism to Christianity to move up in society, and Christian David Ginsburg certainly did that, but by all indications he was a devout believer. The cherry on top was that he was able to move up. He moved to London where his mother was from, and he was able to move through society and really become an important figure in Victorian England. And so, the period we’re going to be talking about with him is going to be in the 1880s.

Nehemia: So, guys, this is important background. Jews in the 1800s, and in Russia up until 1917, were by law second-class citizens, and oppressed and persecuted. And if a Jew wanted to become a professor at a university, he would often, in many countries, have to convert to Christianity. And it’s almost… I don’t know, is it comical? Meaning, many of these Jews who converted to Christianity didn’t believe in Judaism, and believed no more in Christianity…

David: Right.

Nehemia: …and frankly, neither did most of the Christians around them. So, they were looking at these socioeconomic boundaries, saying, “You can’t become a professor because you are a Jew,” and he’d be like, “I don’t even believe in Judaism.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t believe in Christianity. So, just say you’re a Christian, be baptized formally and officially,” that’s a legal act in Europe at the time, “and then you can advance in society. Yeah, we’ll still call you dirty Jew for sure, of course we will, to your face, not just behind your back, but you’ll be able to be a professor, and you’ll be able to advance.” And you’re saying Christian David Ginsburg… So, he took the name Christian. He wasn’t given that name, he took that name when he converted.

David: You said a lot of people didn’t believe in Judaism or Christianity.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: I think Ginsburg believed in both.

Nehemia: Right.

David: He believed in Judaism, and after, Christianity.

Nehemia: So, that’s what’s so interesting about him. In other words… I mean, I’ve encountered people who are leaders of churches who don’t believe in Christianity. And I’ve encountered people who are leaders of synagogues who don’t believe in Judaism, let’s say according to the traditional formulations. Let’s be fair there, right? And so, that’s a phenomenon that still happens today. But in the 19th century, in the 1800s, that was the difference of, you know, are you some pulpit rabbi who is barely eking out a living? Or are you a respected professor at a university? That could be the difference.

David: Right. And so, Ginsburg went to England, and he became a scholar of, interestingly, people on the fringe of Judaism; the Essenes, the Karaites. He wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel, all these different kinds of things which are really on the fringes in terms of apocalyptics and all that other stuff that’s going on, which isn’t normally in the mainstream of Judaism. But eventually he settled on something that is where I come in, and he basically wrote a four-volume encyclopedia. And it’s not a regular encyclopedia, where it’s just alphabetical and it’s just different topics. What he did was, he went through tens if not hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscript notes (and these are all on the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible) and what he did was, he made sense of them and put them all in order. And that’s his magnum opus, this four-volume work, which if you have it, you all of a sudden can open it up and really have access to dozens and dozens of manuscripts, all at one shot.

Nehemia: And I was just working on something recently, related… not related to this per se, but related to this whole idea that, up until recently, the greatest scholars in the world didn’t have access to manuscripts, they had to rely on what other scholars said. And today, most people, even if they had access to the manuscript, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. And so, what he’s done… and I’ll share the screen here. This is available on archive.org, the full scan of the text. And here he wrote this book called The Masorah. And guys, what is Masorah? Masorah is something like… it means the transmission, so we’ll say something like textus receptus, or the received text… which in Hebrew slash English we call the Masoretic Text, meaning the transmitted text preserved by Jews. That’s what Masoretic Text is. Well, maybe you have a different understanding of Masorah. I’ll let you explain in a minute.

David: Nehemia, tell them how many pages there are at the bottom left. It says you’re on page 6 out of…

Nehemia: 2,537!

David: This is a whopper! This is one of the biggest books you could ever get in both height and in thickness. It’s 2,500 pages long.

Nehemia: Let’s have a look at something here. So, the Masoretic notes are these thousands or maybe like you said, tens of thousands (I don’t know that we’ve counted them) notes that have different details. So, for example, here is note 447 under the letter Mem, and it has some detail of… we could look at this and, I don’t know…

David: Do a different one. That’s not… yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, let’s do a straightforward one, where we won’t completely lose the audience. Let’s see, let’s find an easy one. No, that’s also too complicated for most people. Basically, it’s all kinds of minutiae of spelling, and when we say it’s the transmitted text, what it really means is, there was an attempt to preserve these details. Down to very fine details.

David: Right, like right there, it says…

Nehemia: Oh! This is a beautiful one. I believe Daniel Mynott gave a lecture or something related to this. So, “There are three Heys in the Torah,” “hanir’in tmuhot ve’einan tmuhot,” “which appear questionable but are not questionable.” That’s not what it means. They appear to be interrogative Hey. In other words, Biblical Hebrew has two types of… the letter Hey means the, but there’s also a Hey that introduces a question. So, in other words, you begin with… yeah.

David: And Nehemia, for those of us who want to learn this, this is our second class in our class on Biblical Hebrew.

Nehemia: Is it? Okay.

David: It’s prefixes. So, you have one prefix, which means the, and another one which is a question mark.

Nehemia: Beautiful. So, here we have ha’nefesh, which means the soul, “ha’nefesh ha’chotet hi tamut,” “the soul that sins, it shall die,” that is from Ezekiel 18:20. And then, here is a Hey that, in principle, should be a question. “Ha’shofet kol ha’aretz?” “Is it so that the judge of all the earth?” “Ha’echad ba lagur?” “Is it so that one will come to live among us?” So, this Masoretic note is saying, “These three Heys appear to be interrogative Heys, Hey ha’she’ela, the Hey of questioning, but it’s not really a Hey of questioning.” Why does it tell you that? Because a scribe copying this will come along and say, “Wait a minute; there’s no question here. I’m going to change the vowels…”

David: Change it…

Nehemia: “…to the regular Hey, not the Hey of a question.” So, that’s a very important note. So, my approach to these notes (by and large, there’s exceptions) but most of these notes, I understand them as sort of proofreading notes, that they’re notes for the scribe. That the next copyist (or maybe the original copyist as well, right) that when he comes to it, he doesn’t make a correction, because it’s the impulse of scribes to correct what they see as mistakes. And so, this is a sort of controlling mechanism to prevent them from making a mistake.

David: Right, and it could be these are mistakes, but we keep them. That’s what it’s saying.

Nehemia: Right. That’s interesting.

David: “Just because you think it’s a mistake, we know it could be. It doesn’t matter. This is what we got.”

Nehemia: This is how the text has come down to us…

David: Come down to us.

Nehemia: …and we’re going to continue transmitting it that way, and that’s what we mean by Masoretic Text. Go ahead.

David: So, almost two years ago, I turned 40, and my in-laws wrote me a check. And they said, there was a condition on it for my birthday. They said, “David, you can’t use this to pay the electric company. You got to get something you like. Okay? You got to get something you like.” So, I said, “I want to get a copy of Christian David Ginsburg’s The Masorah, the 2,500-page whopper.” That’s what I wanted.

Nehemia: Even though it’s on archive.org, you wanted a physical copy.

David: Yeah. Anybody who’s used PDFs knows that there’s good things, but there’s bad things. You can’t really move quickly through a PDF, especially if it’s an encyclopedia. You’re not reading through, you’re jumping around…

Nehemia: About a year ago, I was looking at some very fine detail in this book, in Ginsburg’s Masorah, based on the archive.org scan, and I actually couldn’t tell what the accents and vowels were, and I wrote to you and I said, “Can you send me a photo from your phone of the physical copy,” because you’re one of the few people I know personally who has a physical copy. And I all of a sudden saw, “Oh, I thought there was a patach and it was a tzere,” or something, I don’t remember. But the printing isn’t amazing, and on top of that, the scan is less amazing. So, if you take a photo with your phone, there’s details you can see. Like even here, I’ll share this again. Are these tzeres or patachs? I mean, I know from the context this is heisir, but that could have been a patach. How do I know it’s a tzere? Because I know Hebrew, right? But if I didn’t know the context, if there was ambiguous context, which was the case what we were dealing with…

David: Right.

Nehemia: …I would need the physical copy or a better scan, right?

David: And even then, these were actually printed… and he says London on the front page. London. But it was really printed in Austria or Germany.

Nehemia: Really?

David: And he wasn’t the print setter. So, there are mistakes that crept in.

Nehemia: But here, even if it’s not a mistake, I don’t know what he printed, or what was printed, because it’s not the greatest scan ever. And to begin with, in these 1800s (I have some printed books in the 1800s) it’s often hard to tell the difference between Hey and Chet, and very similar letters and symbols.

David: Right. So, what happened was, I took the money and I said I’m going to buy this really old book. They have some reprints, which are almost as much as the books cost me, and so, I just went for the original. And it was funny, because there was this guy on eBay selling them for about six-and-a-half thousand dollars. And I wrote the person, I said, “Listen, the last time these sold at auction, it was for six hundred dollars. So, like, why are you asking so much money, that you’re going to… that’s what you want?” And he said, they’re signed; they’re signed copies. So, I said, “Okay. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to use these. I don’t care that they’re signed.”

Nehemia: But for a lot of book collectors…

David: Then I found on a website…

Nehemia: Wait, hold on. So, for a lot of book collectors a signed original copy is worth more than not unsigned. So, if you have an original, I don’t know, The Hobbit, First Edition, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s worth thousands or more dollars. I don’t know how much it’s worth. It’s worth a lot of money. If it’s in good condition.

David: Right. But I was going to be using these books, so like, it didn’t…

Nehemia: So, for you, it’s functional. You don’t care if it’s something…

David: Yeah. Sure, when people from your podcast come to visit my home, I’ll show them. People are interested. But for most people, it’s not the biggest deal. So, I found on a website called ABE Books…

Nehemia: ABE Books. Yeah, I assume.

David: I used to think it was “Abe” Books. It was A-B-E, ABE Books, and I found on there, there was a copy in Cleveland that was going for 1,100 dollars, and it was not signed.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And so, that is the copy that I got. I got them to come down a little bit, but that was the copy that I got.

Nehemia: Because it wasn’t signed, you got it for less.

David: Yeah. There’s the six-and-a-half for the signed, and the unsigned one was just about 1,100 dollars. If you could show on your screen what it looked like.

Nehemia: Ah, from your article.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: “My well-worn copy of the Masorah,” it says.

David: And so, Nehemia, for those who are just listening, can you describe the condition of the book?

Nehemia: So, there’s four cloth-bound volumes. I believe that’s cloth. The binding is kind of tattered, torn, literally in some places torn. In one place, it looks like a little bit of it is missing. These, for collectors, would not be worth a whole lot of money. And it just goes to show 1,100 dollars instead of 6,500 dollars.

David: Right. You go get a re-bound, it’s beat up. It’s like someone’s used this.

Nehemia: Or a lot of collectors would just say, “No, I’m going to buy a better one. If I want one in my collection, I want one that…” Like, I saw an explanation where, like, this little thing at the top of the… what is it they call that, of the back of the binding? If this is split… or here, like for example, here it’s bent back, the difference of that, of, like, a first edition of… I don’t know, of Dickens or something, would be the difference between hundreds and maybe tens of thousands, especially if it’s signed, right?

David: Right. But for me, didn’t matter.

Nehemia: What do you care? Right. You’re interested in the contents.

David: Right. I’m using this book. So, let’s scroll down… this is…

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Yeah, so you can see here that it wasn’t signed.

Nehemia: So, it says on the front of volume 1, name of subscriber is left blank, name of copy is blank, and signature of the author. So, what does that mean, subscriber? We don’t think about that today. We go to Amazon and we buy a book…

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: What’s a subscriber?

David: Yeah, so, the idea was that it cost a lot of capital to publish a book. So, before you would publish it, you would go around to all the seminaries, the churches (in this case, the synagogues) and you might say, “Hey, are you going to want to buy a book?” And then you pay in advance. And I bet…

Nehemia: Look, we have something like that today. It’s called Kickstarter, but basically…

David: We did! Is that still around?

Nehemia: I don’t know if it’s still around or not, but I once bought something on Kickstarter and I regretted it later. But it looked so amazing. But you never know, there are some amazing things that came off of Kickstarter. So, the idea was… and here was an unusual situation, but maybe not so unusual for Jewish books; Ginsburg had to pay for the printing himself.

David: Right.

Nehemia: And he didn’t have any money! Right? It could be… I don’t know what it would have been; a lot of money. And I’ve printed books. It’s very expensive. Now we have print on demand, which requires a lot less capital. Right? You can do it up front for, relatively inexpensive, and then each one costs more to print. But back then, you would go to a printer and say, “I want 500 copies.” You probably didn’t have more than 500 copies, I would guess. I don’t know. Look, even 20 years ago, when I was working on some publications that were being printed by Oxford University Press and Brill, I asked the question, “How many copies do you guys print?” And one of them was 850 copies. I’m like, “How is that possible? I wrote a popular book, not an academic book, and I did 3,000 copies.” And I was told by the printer, “Are you sure you even want to do this? Is it even worth it for you?” “Yeah, it’s worth it for me. I know it costs a lot of money, but it’s worth it, because I want to get this stuff out.” And then, when I reprinted, I did 5,000 copies. Brill was an Oxford University Press. I think it was Brill, was doing 850 copies for a semi-popular book, meaning it was an academic book but meant for the broad public. So, in the 1800s, I don’t know how many copies he made. Maybe it was 100, maybe it was 500. It wasn’t tens of thousands of copies. And so, he would collect money. He would collect subscriptions and say, “Oh, you want a copy?” And if he had enough subscriptions, he could print ones maybe that weren’t subscription, I guess. I’m not really sure how it worked.

David: Yeah, it was hard to get a copy. There’s a story that the tsar of Russia, who had a lot of manuscripts (and if you have Hebrew manuscripts, this book is really important) wrote a letter to the ambassador of England saying, “Hey, can you get me Ginsburg’s The Masorah?” So, yeah, it was…

Nehemia: Was he able to get it?

David: I imagine so. You would know better, Nehemia, because you went to St. Petersburg.

Nehemia: Well, we’d have to look it up in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. So, that’d be an interesting question for someone to go look up; did the Tsar ultimately get it, and is his a signed copy? So, why was the copy signed? That’s a weird thing to us today. In other words, so, here’s an important thing; if you have a signed copy of Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby, or something he wrote, I don’t think it was signed originally. Somebody bought the book from a commercial bookseller or commercial publisher (the publisher sold it to booksellers who, then, you bought the book from them) and then you would maybe meet the author, and you would ask him to sign it. Here it’s completely different. How did these get signed, and why?

David: Well, I think they were signing it almost as, like, a thank you. And like, “Hey, you signed up for this. Thank you.” And also, to make sure that you’re getting my copy, that nobody else is pirating it.

Nehemia: So, this is an interesting concept.

David: Yeah, like we think of pirating. Nehemia, you and I remember, I don’t know how many of your listeners remember Napster, pirated music, and all that. Like, this was going back way before the digital age; people were pirating books and selling them.

Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting thing. Before the French Revolution, one of the tightest censorship systems was France, the kingdom of France. And every certain period, the French government would put out a list of books that were censored. And all of the printers around France, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, and Germany, would get that list, and they’d say, “Oh, these are the books we should print because we have no competitors.” And so, they would print pirate copies of the books that were illegal to print in France, smuggle them into France, and people would buy them.

And so, we don’t think about this today (many people don’t) that there were pirated books back… There are pirated books today, right? I mean, I use this service called Otzar Chochma, where they have this online database for all these traditional Rabbinical books, some of them recent books from the last few years, and there’ll be a thing at the front page that will say, you know, “If you’re not seeing such and such, this is a pirated copy.” Today we see that kind of thing!

David: People pirate my videos. There’s a guy in India that takes my videos and then just does his voiceover of exactly the same thing. And, like, yeah, it’s totally normal. So…

Nehemia: So, I was once in the Philippines, in 2014, and I was asked there to speak. I spoke at this church, and this lady walks up to me and asks me to sign my book. And it’s spiral-bound. And I’m like, “Wait, I know I didn’t print a spiral-bound book.” So, she had asked me to sign a pirate copy that I guess she made herself because she couldn’t afford it. And… all right.

David: You signed it.

Nehemia: I absolutely signed it, and I was touched that she thought my book was important enough to pirate. She wasn’t doing it for commercial purposes. These pirates generally are doing it… In other words, they’re saying, “Wait a minute; other people want to buy Ginsburg’s book as well. Let’s make a pirated copy and we’ll sell it for a lot of money, and when he runs out of his subscription sales, we’ll pick up the slack.”

David: But this was important to me, because this was my first indication that something was weird about my book.

Nehemia: That it wasn’t signed.

David: It wasn’t signed. So, the guy on eBay, his is signed. How come mine’s not? It’s supposed to be signed. And then… so, all of a sudden, I started opening up the book, and I noticed two things at the same time. The first thing was that all 2,500 pages had pencil scorings down the line in the margins.

Nehemia: What does scorings mean?

David: So, each page has two margins; let’s say, the right-side margin and the left-side margin.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: Someone took a pencil and drew a line down both sides of every single page, 2,500 pages.

Nehemia: So that they could write notes or something.

David: Something. We don’t know. And then so that was, like, “Okay, I have no idea what’s going on here.” So, you know, now I’ve got two weird things with this book. And then, the third thing was where things actually got extremely weird. In this book, the two most important volumes are one and two. Those are really where the greatest mass of information is. And so, in one and two, every time I would go to two, I would notice these little handwritten notes, and just, like, move away from them because I didn’t understand them. But as time… remember, I’m using this every day. This is, like, on my desk. All of a sudden, I can’t ignore these notes. So, Nehemia, could you please pull up, and let’s take a look at what some of these notes look like.

Nehemia: And guys, just to think about this; 2500 pages, and every single page somebody took a ruler and put a pencil mark to sort of make boundaries where they could…

David: Yeah. Next time somebody asks me, “Can you do something for me?” And I go, “Oh, I don’t know if I have the time,” I’m going to think of this, Nehemia. Hey, you know, somebody…

Nehemia: So, this is an example of one of these… I call these ruling lines.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they’re made with a ruler.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, here are these lines. And this was made by hand in pencil on 2,500 pages.

David: Scroll up for just a little bit.

Nehemia: More here.

David: Okay, no, scroll down… good. And so, let’s just see at that top image there. What we see over here is, we’re looking at one of the encyclopedia entries, and on the left-side margin there’s a pencil line, and then there are notes.

Nehemia: By the way, I downloaded this from Sfarad. There’s a mistake here that you have to ask them to fix. They’re using Arabic numbers instead of Arabic numerals. I mean these are…

David: Yeah, something happened. That’s a mistake.

Nehemia: So, let’s ask them to fix it. They can fix that. At least online they can.

David: Okay so, what we’re looking at here is that there are notes, and they’re cryptic. 277A… what I first thought was 376… you see in the red there Nehemia. If you could highlight it…

Nehemia: All right, so here… okay. So, wait, hold on, let’s back up here. So, this is volume 2, page 243, and it’s under letter Mem, and that in Arabic says 718, which is over here. 718 in Arabic numerals, and these are in Arabic…

David: Yeah, that was a font issue.

Nehemia: They’ll fix the font, hopefully. And then here in Hebrew, it’s Tashiach, Tav-Shin-Yud-Chet, which comes out to 718. So, in other words, this is list number 718 under the letter Mem.

David: Mem.

Nehemia: And this is based on him comparing a bunch of different manuscripts, and it says here Isaiah 60:13.

David: And next to it…

Nehemia: And that’s in print. And then to the left, in red pen, it says 277A. The next line says, Psalms 26:8. And to the left of it in red pen, it says 370… it looks like a 6, but I assume that’s a B. And then, to the left of the vertical pencil line, it says… is that in blue pen or black pen?

David: Purple, 151A.

Nehemia: Okay, 151A, and below that 237B. So, yeah.

David: So, automatically, I’m saying to myself… and you can scroll down. You’ll see on this one page 18 of these.

Nehemia: Somebody went through a lot of trouble to add notes to a printed volume, giving what appear to be, if I had a guess, not knowing any… well, I heard your lecture so I’m cheating…

David: No, that’s fine, say it, yeah.

Nehemia: …but if I didn’t know anything, I would say, “Oh, these are page numbers in a manuscript that has…”

David: Or early printed, because…

Nehemia: Or could be early printing, yeah.

David: …the first books didn’t have page numbers like we do. They had side A and side B.

Nehemia: Well, to this day in Rabbinical books, they’ll say, you know, Aleph and Bet; side A and side B.

David: Yeah, in the Gemara, 100 percent.

Nehemia: So, in other words, we say, you know, page 55. They would say, “Oh, that’s page…” I don’t know, 22B, right?

David: Right.

Nehemia: So, in other words, they’re actually not counting pages technically, they’re counting folios.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: A folio in Latin is a leaf, or in English now it’s a leaf, meaning it’s the physical page, which has a front and a back, Aleph and Bet. Or in Latin they’ll say recto and verso. Okay.

David: So, I have on my bookshelf a really fascinating little copy of a biblical book by someone named Seligman Bayer in the 1800s, and it has notes all over it. Notes in Greek, notes in Hebrew. It’s an amazing notes thing. But I could tell very clearly that this was somebody commenting on Scripture.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Whereas with this one here, it almost felt like this was explaining the book. Like, why would you put a cryptic note here unless you knew something about this book that nobody else knew?

Nehemia: Who would this help?

David: And I was kind of thinking, maybe these were the sources. You know, perhaps somebody’s trying to undo Ginsburg and argue against him. I wasn’t quite sure. So, the next step for me was trying to figure out who wrote these notes. That, for me, became the big issue.

Nehemia: Well, I mean, I would say there’s two questions here. The bigger question I would ask, and I know you asked it, so, again, I’ve heard the lecture and I’ve read the article… so, the bigger question is, what are the manuscripts they’re referring to? Right? Because that, actually, could be really useful. And then secondly, who wrote this and why?

David: Right. So, you have to say… so, in the 1800s, only a few people on earth had access to manuscripts, or at least a number of manuscripts. And so, Ginsburg was one of those people. Now you start saying, “Well, who else?” And you can probably count them on your hands, you know, and try and cross them out. But for me, the big question was, was it Ginsburg? Right? It’s his book.

Nehemia: Just so people understand the significance of not having access to the original manuscript. So, there’s a famous case of the Karaite Abraham Firkovich, who went around the Middle East and the Russian Empire, and he was a manuscript collector. The Firkovich Collections in St. Petersburg were collected by him. That’s at the Russian National Library today, which is considered the greatest collection of early Masoretic Bible manuscripts in the world. So, one of the things he was accused of was being a forger. And what was the nature of his forgery? So, he would write a letter, a handwritten letter, to some scholar, and say, “I found a manuscript, and here’s what it says in this manuscript.” And eventually, people said, “That sounds too good to be true. Show us that manuscript.” And he couldn’t come up with it. And they said, “Okay, he sent us a copy of what it says. How do we know it really says that? Maybe he just made that up.” And in some instances, he… based on what I know today, almost certainly made it up. In one instance, after he died, the librarian in Saint Petersburg said, “I couldn’t find this document. He lied and made up the document.” About 10 or 20 years ago they found it.

David: Wow.

Nehemia: So, for over 100 years it was a fact that he was a forger, because this unbelievable document that he says he found wasn’t… and why didn’t they find it? Because there are hundreds of thousands or millions of documents in the Russian National Library. Or, back then it was the Russian Imperial Library. That was the tzar’s library, right? And, you know, they couldn’t find something. I’ve gone to libraries in the 21st century, and I said, “There’s such and such thing in your catalog. I’d like to see it,” And they can’t find it. And I’m talking about manuscripts. And I’m like, “Wait, you’re saying you misplaced a manuscript?” This happens particularly with scrolls, because scrolls don’t fit so neatly onto a shelf.

David: They’re huge.

Nehemia: Right. So, they’ll stick it up like you see here. This is a library, this photo, a famous one behind me…

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: …is a library in Bologna. Bologna University Library took this photo. So, imagine you have a scroll and you don’t know where to put it, so you stick it up here. And then, you retire, and two librarians later, they’re like, “I don’t know where that is. It’s somewhere in the library. We’ll find it one day. Maybe.” So, this happens today, especially with scrolls, but not just scrolls, with Codices. Like, priceless manuscripts are misplaced even today. So, all right, I forget why I mentioned that.

David: So, you were going to say that Ginsburg, he never told us which manuscripts used…

Nehemia: Oh, so Ginsburg had access to the manuscripts, but he didn’t always… well, in his introduction, he says which manuscripts he used, right? But here was one…

David: He only mentions a few. He never…

Nehemia: Ah, he doesn’t give the full list.

David: He doesn’t tell you which he gets from which. So, if he’s using 40 manuscripts, you have to now go through all 40.

Nehemia: So, let’s look at an example of what we’re talking about here from your article, okay? And you have a page here from Ginsburg, and there’s a note here, note number 390, under Kaf. It says “la’kna’ani, three times in Scripture, and they are…” and then it lists the three times that that form appears. And then, somebody writes a note, handwritten, 156a.

David: So, what…

Nehemia: And what we don’t know from Ginsburg is, where did Ginsburg get this note?

David: Get this note. He got it from either one or more manuscripts…

Nehemia: But we don’t know that from the book.

David: He could have got it from all 40. But we don’t know.

Nehemia: So, somebody actually did a PhD dissertation, a student of Yosef Ofer, Anat Hayut, where she went through a bunch of manuscripts (I want to say they were in London, at what is today the British Library; back then it was the British Museum Library, in the time of Ginsburg) and she found the sources of a bunch of the notes.

David: Yeah, and what she basically did was, about a third of the notes she was able to find in these two or three or even four key matches…

Nehemia: And some of the notes she couldn’t find, right?

David: Yeah like, 60 to 70 percent; they’re not there. So, my thought was, “Wait a minute. Is this the source?”

Nehemia: Hmm.

David: And then, that would be very helpful to people like Nehemia and me, and hopefully some of your viewers, to say, “Well, wait. I want to look it up.”

Nehemia: And here’s why it’s important to look it up. So, back in the day of Ginsburg, if I wanted to know what the note in the Masorah was (and I almost say Masorah in air quotes) on the word la’kna’ani, I had to do one of two things: I had to travel around the world looking at manuscripts, or I could look in Ginsburg.

David: Right.

Nehemia: And today, because the manuscripts (many of them, not all of them) have been digitized, we can look up and we can see, “Oh, you know, Anat Hayut found these four manuscripts have 30 percent of the notes. Is this in there?” And by the way, where do you look for it? Well, you would look in Joshua 13:3. You’d look in Ezra 9:1. You’d look in Proverbs 31:24. Right? So, you’d have to look in three different passages, maybe in a fourth, because maybe this note appears somewhere else in some of the manuscripts, I don’t know.

And then, here’s where it’s very hard to prove the negative, right? Let’s say someone were to come today and say that Ginsburg was a forger. It’d be very, very difficult to prove. I don’t think he was, by the way. But if you wanted to prove that, back then it would be almost impossible to prove. So, he was on the honor system, in many respects. But maybe he made mistakes. And there’s no way to know if he made… or the printer might have made a mistake.

David: Right.

Nehemia: And there’s no way to know if the printer or he made a mistake without looking in the manuscript and checking for yourself. Where do I start?

David: Right. And often, just looking at a manuscript, you see things that aren’t included on the page…

Nehemia: Because they can’t include everything. They have to be selective, right? Because even today, when you look in a critical edition of the Tanakh, or any book, they can’t include everything. Right?

David: Right.

Nehemia: Right. So, they’re including what they think is important. Maybe there’s other things they thought weren’t important that you think is important.

David: All right. So, now we’re up to the key moment. So, we’ve got this massive book, this four-volume, 2,500-page book, that has no sources. There’s no footnotes, there’s no endnotes, there’s no bibliography. We don’t know where all these mountains of information comes from. And are these notes, possibly Ginsburg himself, telling you? So, Nehemia, could you please share the next picture, where I compared Ginsburg’s handwriting, as we know it in Cambridge, with the handwriting in my book?

Nehemia: Okay. All right. All right. Here we have the Kaf manuscript. Should I tell what the Kaf Manuscript is, or do you want to…?

David: Sure.

Nehemia: So, I was at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I was there to look at some Torah scrolls and some other manuscripts. And the librarian comes up to me, and he says he’s been going through some boxes, and in the boxes, he found a bunch of unpublished manuscripts. Are they of any importance? And I look at some of them, and I’m like, “Yeah, not particularly.” And then I look at this, and I see the Kaf. And what is Kaf? So, they’re alphabetical, the way Ginsburg arranged the Masoretic notes. And then he has a volume where he gives an English sort of explanation of what the various notes are, and he gets through Aleph through Yud. And he says something like, “When I have more money, I’ll do Kaf and on. Kaf through Tav, which I’ve already prepared.” And he never printed it.

So, this librarian finds Kaf and shows it to me. I’m like, “Yes! This is very important.” And I send it to Prof. Ofer, who right now is working on an edition of it. And by the way, how did it end up in the Wren Library at Trinity College? So, Ginsburg needed money. Let me tell this; it’s worth telling the story. Ginsburg needed money for various things. He was deeply in debt for printing his books. He took subscriptions but it wasn’t enough.

By the way, I know a story, which I won’t go into details of names, but I have a story, a very famous story in a certain community, where somebody did the exact same thing. He took subscriptions for a book that he was working on, and then he fell into debt, and he took the money to pay his debts. And the book was never printed. So, this happens. It happens in the 21st century, or maybe that was the 20th century. It might have been in the 90s. I don’t remember.

So, Ginsburg falls into debt. He’s not going to steal the money from the people who subscribe. So, what does he do? He goes to Aldous Wright, who is… I don’t know if at that time he was at Trinity College, but at some point, he… and he says, “You give me the money, and when I die, you can have my library.” And when Ginsburg died, the library was turned over to Aldous Wright. And then Aldous Wright donated it to Trinity College. So, his library includes boxes of handwritten documents, including the Kaf Manuscript. Where is Lamed through Tav? Nobody’s found that yet. Could still be at Wren Library.

David: So, everyone should be aware; because of Nehemia, this was put online. His handwriting was put online. And it wasn’t just like one, “Dear mom, hope you’re doing well,” note, it was 100 pages of dense handwriting.

Nehemia: Yeah, so, he prepared it for the typesetter, right? Meaning, he prepared it for printing, not necessarily for the typesetters.

David: And so, Nehemia, because of you, I was able to now compare his handwriting easily to mine. So, why don’t we take a look at it?

Nehemia: Okay. And Prof. Ofer convinced him to put it online, but I sent photos of it to Prof. Ofer. Yeah, all right. So…

David: So, let’s do the middle column. Let’s go for that.

Nehemia: Okay. Yeah, there’s no question that this is the same hand. And what’s important here, guys… and you’ve really done amazing pieces of detective work here, David. What David did here is, he took the same words written in cursive, and in the case of the numbers, they’re, you know, numbers; but he took the same exact words from the Kaf Manuscript that we know was written by Ginsburg, and from his personal copy of this book, under the idea that maybe Ginsburg is the one who wrote all these tens of thousands or however many notes. And when you look at the handwriting, like the word Deuteronomy, if you just took like an E or something, who knows, right? Or a T. But when you take the full set of words, you see how he writes Genesis and Exodus, these abbreviations, Numbers. Look at the shape of the N, a little curl on the left side of the N. Right? This is clearly written by Ginsburg.

David: So, my little cheap, quote-unquote cheap, which was very expensive, the most expensive book I’ve ever bought, you know, my inexpensive copy, all of a sudden didn’t have Ginsburg’s signature, but it had tens of hundreds of hours of his notes, of handwritten notes.

Nehemia: So, in other words, this is Ginsburg’s personal copy, where he’s adding notes. And when he says it’s on page 163a of a certain manuscript, he knows that, because he must have some other notes. Maybe those are still at Wren Library at Trinity College. But he must have some other notes of what he sent to the typesetter, and the typesetter didn’t include those.

And it could be he had index cards, right? In other words, what they would do… we don’t know that Ginsburg did this, but what many, many scholars would do back in the day, and in fact, until relatively recently, is, they would have an index card, a three-by-five or something index card. I don’t know what size they used. And on that, they would say, “Okay, there’s this note in this manuscript,” and they’d write the page number, they’d write the note, and then they’d organize those index cards alphabetically. And they’d say, “Oh, these two manuscripts have the same note. It’s slightly different wording. Now I, Ginsburg, am going to decide which of the wordings to use.”

And that’s why this is important for me, because, when I see this, you know, verbiage, well here’s, you know, “va’yikana gimel ve’simanhon”, I don’t know that that’s in any manuscript. In other words, he might have found that in four different manuscripts, and each one had slight differences, and he’s giving… I don’t know, right, he might be giving what we would call an eclectic version. An eclectic version means he’s taken the four different index cards, and he says, “Okay, in this one, they misspelled one of the words. In this other one they left out this word. I’m going to give you my version.” Why? “Because it’s all kind of the same thing.” Well, but it’s not the same thing. Right? Or maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, right?

David: Yes, so, here we had the exciting opportunity to see his sources. And so, for me now, the question was; well, remember that pencil line down the middle of the margins?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: That was differentiating between two manuscripts, between the purple, and the red and black.

Nehemia: And again, guys, just to understand here, somebody wrote a PhD dissertation. That’s an investment of three to five years…

David: Yep.

Nehemia: …trying to identify the source of notes, and she found, you said 30 percent of the notes. I don’t remember that.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Something like 30 percent of the notes in four of the manuscripts, and here Ginsburg is telling you not only what manuscript it is, but what page it is. But he doesn’t tell you what manuscript; you just have to figure out based on the page numbers.

David: Right.

Nehemia: You have to reverse engineer it. How do you do that when there’s 40 manuscripts he used?

David: Right.

Nehemia: So, if you can find which manuscript has a certain note on page 163A and then you check it, because it could be a coincidence, right? You check it across a bunch of different notes. Then you say, “Oh, this refers to manuscript X and this refers to manuscript Y.” So, that’s an incredible piece of scholarly sleuthing, I would call that. That’s an incredible piece of scholarly Sherlock Holmesery to try to find that kind of thing.

David: Right.

Nehemia: Did you find it? We’re on the edge of our seat.

David: So…

Nehemia: So, wait, wait. The first big lead is what they call the burying lead, David. You discovered Ginsburg’s personal copy. And guys, let’s back up. Christian David Ginsburg was a Jewish convert to Christianity. He was a true believer both in Judaism and Christianity; certainly, in Christianity he was a true believer. We know that from a bunch of different sources. And he is, to this day, considered the founder of Masoretic studies, what I spend my life on, as a modern scholarship, right? Meaning, like modern, in the sense of modern critical scholarship, right? Meaning, we have a scholar in like, what is it, the 16th century, Eliyahu B’chur, who kind of, or Elijah Levitas, they call him, who is a scholar of the Masorah, but he’s not a modern scholar using modern approaches. Christian David Ginsburg is, meaning, he’s comparing manuscripts and he’s doing it critically, and sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad, right?

But in any event, he’s the founder of Masoretic studies and he is a Jewish convert to Christianity. And although you are the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program… So, let’s address this. You’re the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, yet you’ve written an article about a Jewish convert to Christianity. Is that controversial, and why not?

David: It’s certainly not controversial.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Listen, in the world we live in, there’s always going to be people on the edges of…

Nehemia: Like me!

David: …of groups who are moving back and forth and back and forth, and Christian David Ginsburg is one of those fascinating people. He’s really… you said, like you. It’s interesting, Nehemia, some of the things that he’s studied are the kinds of things that are the most exciting parts of biblical studies.

Nehemia: Hundred percent.

David: Right, the Karaites, the interpretation of… the Essenes…

Nehemia: Why do you think he focused on these edge cases? I have an idea, but what do you think? Why do you think he would… Even the Masorah, in a sense, is an edge case. Meaning, when he’s at yeshiva, they’re not sitting there studying Masorah.

David: Right, they’re not. I really want to point out that what he did was not easy.

Nehemia: No.

David: We were at the conference this year, Nehemia, when somebody…

Nehemia: SBL, Society of Biblical Literature, yeah…

David: At the Society of Biblical Literature, somebody gave a presentation about his life and mentioned how he had left a child behind in Europe, in Poland, and started life anew in England, and never had any contact back again. And that really troubled me. Like, why would he have done that? Why would he abandon his child? And then somebody raised their hand and said, “Well, how do you know he wasn’t exiled?” He probably was.

Nehemia: I mean, it’s a no-brainer to me. When somebody converts to Christianity, certainly in the 1800s in Europe…

David: Yeah, their family is not going to speak to them.

Nehemia: Not just, they don’t speak to them, they sit shiva. Meaning, they literally sit on the ground for seven days…

David: Yeah…

Nehemia: … which is what you do when somebody dies. Look, my father went to his rabbi, and said, “My son has become a Karaite. Do I have to sit shiva?” In other words, does my father (of blessed memory) did he have to treat me as if I had died because I no longer accepted the Oral Law? And his rabbi’s response would have been binding to him, in his eyes. And his Orthodox rabbi said to him, “Well, at least he’s not Reform.” And what did he explain? He said, “The Reform deny both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, your son just denies the Oral Torah. He still accepts the Written Torah.”

So, that was a very, let’s say, moderate response. There’s many Orthodox rabbis today would say, “Of course you have to sit shiva.” And if he was a Christian? Not he. If I had converted to Christianity or Messianic Judaism, then my father wouldn’t have asked the question, he would have known he had to sit shiva. So, in other words, his wife treated him as if he’s dead…

David: You can imagine…

Nehemia: His child probably didn’t have a say in it. And here, we don’t know this for a fact, but it’s reasonable to infer that that’s what happened.

David: Yeah, so, the fact that he’s doing this is not without cost.

Nehemia: Right, personal cost, where you decide to become a Christian knowing that you’ll never see your child again.

David: Or your family.

Nehemia: As far as your child knows, you might be dead. Look, I have a story from about 10 years ago, no, seven years ago. I was working on my PhD, and I went to a certain library, I won’t say which, and the librarian comes out to me, and we’re talking about Moses Shapira of the famous Shapira Scrolls. I did an episode with Edan Dershowitz about it. And the librarian says to me… and we’re speaking in Hebrew; she says, “Do you know he was a meshumad, an apostate?” And I thought, “What a strange thing for a scholar to say. That’s highly inappropriate. Like, why is that relevant?”

But here’s what she really meant, right? Because Shapira was accused of being a forger. And really the subtext there is: what do you expect from an apostate? His whole life is a lie. And it really shocked me that someone in the 21st century, someone with a PhD, someone who’s a scholar, someone who’s a respected academic, still has this sort of prejudice against somebody who converts to Christianity. And this is a secular person, right? Imagine now an Orthodox Jew in 19th century Poland, right? And imagine the social cost for Ginsburg to say, “I’m going to walk away from my family, from my child, from my community, because I feel,” Christians say, “convicted by this belief.” I mean…

David: Yeah. And so, in a certain sense, that’s a really fascinating person; a person who’s really navigated two different worlds and went from one to the other. So, yeah, I don’t see in any way is that an issue, personally. I will say, Nehemia, I understand that you got that comment, and maybe your father’s rabbi might have said that, but not everyone feels that way.

Nehemia: No, a hundred percent, no. No, no. Look, but even my father’s rabbi said, “No, you can have a relationship with your son. You don’t have to treat him as if he’s dead.” That was a very big deal. You know, my father would have done whatever the rabbi…

David: Right.

Nehemia: …said, whatever he gave him as a… like, it was a she’ela. It was a formal question, right?

David: Right.

Nehemia: And he gave him a formal response, right, which was considered binding by my father, at least, and by the rabbi. And he didn’t. Look, I mean, I know a lot of people in, I’ll just call them Christian denominations without giving details, who remained Christians, but were no longer dues-paying members of that denomination, and their parents have to shun them. Or their children have to shun them, meaning treat them as if they’re not allowed to speak to them, they’re not allowed to interact with them. So, this happens today.

David: This happens.

Nehemia: Look, it happens in some ultra-Orthodox denominations today.

David: But in a certain sense, it could be what led him, as you say, to the Masorah, because these notes, they’re there, but rabbis don’t study them. And so, it’s also, they were written by people who, you might agree with me on this, were most likely Karaites. And so…

Nehemia: I don’t think any of the manuscripts he worked with were copied by Karaites, let’s put it that way. And some of the notes…

David: 4445? You don’t think so?

Nehemia: Oh, okay, all right. So, that one may be.

David: That’s old…

Nehemia: Right. All right, so, that one may be. But most of his manuscripts were… and that one we don’t know for sure. Most of his manuscripts were relatively late, or we would consider them late today.

David: So, he has a little paragraph here, and the second part of the paragraph says, “The list of donors and subscribers for whom the work is printed will be given in the third volume.” And here’s the key part. “Each volume has on it the name of the subscriber and a number, as well as the signature of the author. Copies without these marks will be considered pirated. Christian David Ginsburg.”

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And so, that’s the eBay volume, which for 6,500 dollars was saying, “Hey, we’ve got it. We’ve got the author’s signature.” Whereas mine did not.

Nehemia: So, in other words, the reason yours didn’t have a signature, based on this, we can infer, is because it wasn’t purchased by a subscriber, it belonged to the original author. He only signed the ones that he sent off to subscribers.

David: Right.

Nehemia: Along with a number. Yours wouldn’t be numbered because it belonged to him. It was his personal copy.

David: Right.

Nehemia: What’s interesting, by the way, is, he also writes this in Hebrew, and the word for pirated here is ganuv, stolen. That’s interesting!

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Very cool. That’s very, very cool. All right. Beautiful. Wow. So, wow, very interesting.

David: Okay, but let’s do some sleuthing. You ready for some more sleuthing?

Nehemia: Let’s do some sleuthing. This is exciting. All right.

David: Okay. All right. So, I needed to figure out what these purple notes are and what these red notes are.

Nehemia: Are they consistently purple when they’re in the outer margin?

David: Outer margin is purple.

Nehemia: Always?

David: Always. And inner margin is red or black. And I didn’t know if red and black were two different manuscripts, but I was able to determine that the red only goes up to, like, page 80, and then 81 is black. So, it’s really one manuscript.

Nehemia: And this is just a question that I don’t know the answer to. I don’t know that, on my computer, I can tell that that’s purple.

David: Yeah, but it is purple.

Nehemia: No, no, I believe you.

David: No, no, no, yeah.

Nehemia: So, here’s an example, guys. I did an interview with a guy who’s a scholar of Mormonism, and he made a statement which I think is profound, and it’s something that many people who deal with manuscripts know. But he put it really, really clearly. He said, all photographs lie. Right? So, here you have the original handwritten notes, and this is a photograph of the notes, and you can see details that aren’t necessarily obvious.

David: Yeah, because… so, for everyone to just kind of think about the lighting on this.

Nehemia: Right.

David: I’m not a professional photographer. This was from my iPhone.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: The second thing is, the paper isn’t white. It’s yellow from age.

Nehemia: Yes.

David: And then the third thing is, the purple has faded.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: So, like, it’s there, but it’s a weak purple… but it’s there…

Nehemia: And now that you’re telling me it’s purple, I believe you and I can see it, but I don’t know that I would know that that was purple. I would bet (and I don’t know the answer to this) but it would be interesting to open this up in photoshop from the PDF, because that’s what most people have access to, and use the eyedropper tool and see if it identifies it as purple. Guys, I’m only mentioning this because it’s important to know that, when you look at a photograph of a manuscript, you have to take into account that there is something called a white balance that… I just spent weeks working on a question related to this in Berlin; the imaging software does things that it doesn’t always tell you, that are a black box. So, just… it’s important to know that.

David: All right, and I would like everyone to know that Nehemia has an open invitation to my home in Yonkers, New York, and Nehemia will update you if it’s a different color.

Nehemia: I’mthe worst person to tell you about what colors are. I famously once went out of the house wearing one black Croc and another that was navy blue, and when someone pointed it out, I looked down at my feet, I said, “Oh yeah, now I see it.” But I hadn’t noticed it at home. And then I bought a black car which turned out to be very dark green. And now, every time I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah, obviously it’s green.” But you know, in the lighting that I bought it, I did not notice that. So, anyway.

David: Okay, so, back to sleuthing.

Nehemia: Yes.

David: Here we go. So, Nehemia, I had about two, three thousand notes, and I didn’t know how to make sense of them. So, the first thing that I did was try and look up all those…

Nehemia: Oh, wait, this is really cool. Here you have volume 2, page 143, it’s in your article on page 5. You have a black note, you have two purple notes, and you have a red note.

David: Right. And I put that in because it’s not clear, the color…

Nehemia: It’s definitely not clear, yeah.

David: Right. So, I started with the purple notes. I said, I want to figure these things out. And the moment of insight came to me was something that I rarely use well, is Microsoft Excel.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Isaid, “These are numbers. Why don’t I just start plugging in the numbers?” And so, if the number is 100A and it’s on verse Ecclesiastes 12:6, I would put in Ecclesiastes 12:6, 100A. And then by doing that, what I was able to do was rearrange all the thousands of notes in a way that made sense, and something jumped at me on the screen.

Nehemia: What was that?

David: So, your listeners probably have heard of the term Tanakh.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: Tanakh, which stands for the Torah, the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim, the Writings.

Nehemia: And just as a side note, if people want to learn the Hebrew of the Tanakh, known as Biblical Hebrew, where can they do that?

David: At the Jewish Theological Seminary Biblical Hebrew Program. Thank you, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Of which you’re the director. And you could learn online. And it’s for someone who doesn’t even know the Aleph–Bet. And guys, I don’t know if you realize what an opportunity this is to study at JTS’s program, Biblical Hebrew.

David: Right.

Nehemia: Let me ask a question here. So, it’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. Do they have to be Jewish to study in the program?

David: Absolutely not. What we’re talking about with Ginsburg is, I think, a great example. You could be a Rabbinic Jew, you could be a Karaite Jew, you could be a believing Christian of any denomination, et cetera. We study Tanakh together, we read together, and people from all backgrounds have insights and teach me and teach each other about studying the Tanakh. So, it’s open to everybody, and I think this study that we’re talking about… I’m not bothered by Christian David Ginsburg. Neither are you, right? It’s not a big deal. Jews and Christians can sit down next to each other and study at the same time, and it makes it better for everyone, in my personal opinion. So…

Nehemia: Is this an example of diversity is our strength? In other words, that motto actually has something profound behind it, which is that if everybody has the same view on the world, you’re going to have blind spots. But where diversity really is powerful, and this is, I think, a very Jewish idea, is where you have lots of different perspectives and beliefs and approaches, and you have conversations where maybe at first you’re talking past each other, because you have a set of assumptions, they have a set of assumptions, and you realize, “Oh, I never thought that somebody else would see the world that way.” So, that’s a really powerful…

David: We’re reading the Book of Daniel right now. Each semester, in our most advanced class, Biblically Reformed, it’s a reading circle. So, there’s no lecture, we just read together, and we’re doing Daniel.

Nehemia: The Hebrew or the Aramaic parts of Daniel?

David: We’re doing the Hebrew parts of Daniel.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Everything that’s in Hebrew. And the thing about it is that, when we’re studying some of the prophecies, there’s many different ways to unpack those prophecies of events. Some people are going to say, “No, this was written for the Maccabean period.” No, other people are going to say this was written for the time of Jesus. Other people are going to say, “No, it’s written for the time of the destruction of the Temple,” and you can even go further and…

Nehemia: Or it’s an end times prophecy, right…

David: Andwe’re all in the same thing studying together, aware of each other, and that’s totally fine.

Nehemia: And the goal here is to understand what the words mean in their context, and not to… and I guess it’s a question of what’s the context.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: But in the literary context, that’s not really in question.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: The historical context is.

David: And like, for example, we’re doing Daniel right now, this semester. Each semester we do a Torah, Nevi’im, or Ketuvim. We’re doing right now the Ketuvim, Daniel. And what we’re doing is, we get stuck on some verses, and it’s something we’ve never seen before, but it’s because Daniel is cryptic, kind of like this study we’re doing.

Nehemia: Well, you made the comment before that Daniel is at the edge of Judaism. I think for a lot of non-Jews, that will be surprising.

David: No…

Nehemia: Why is studying Daniel kind of an edge case?

David: Well, what I mean is, for example, is that his prophecies are open-ended enough that all of a sudden, when he’s talking about, “Jeremiah said 70 years, but I say 490 years,” all of a sudden, where do you start counting that? People from earliest Christian texts, earliest, have been saying that prophecy applies to the year 33, right around where Jesus was dying. And so, that would be a text that would kind of connect the Tanakh to the New Testament prophecies, etcetera.

Nehemia: But also, in like a traditional yeshiva in B’nei Brak, they’re not studying the Book of Daniel, am I right?

David: No. In Jewish traditional yeshivas, Daniel only comes up when it’s quoted in the Talmud.

Nehemia: Okay. All right, that’s what most people probably…

David: But back to sleuthing, Nehemia…

Nehemia: Sleuthing Christian David Ginsburg’s Masorah, four volumes. You have them. You have the personal copy of Ginsburg, and…

David: And cryptic notes. And I’m trying to figure out the purple notes. I put them in an Excel document, and can you please share on your screen what I was able to uncover?

Nehemia: Okay, is this here in the article? I don’t remember.

David: Keep going down.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: There it is.

Nehemia: Oh! So, these are the purple notes specifically.

David: So, these are the purple notes. So, for example, there’s the number 59A, and that’s on Leviticus 25:38.

Nehemia: Wait, where are we? Oh, here, here this one.

David: In this box, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And then like… looks like a 232B, about two-thirds of the way down.

Nehemia: Okay, this is, just to be clear, this isn’t all the notes because there’s hundreds or maybe thousands…

David: No, this is our example notes of the purple notes. But the thing that popped out more than anything is that we’ve got the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, we’ve got the writings, the Ketuvim, but there’s no Prophets.

Nehemia: And another thing here is that Chronicles appears before Psalms, so, you have the book order in this manuscript, the purple note manuscript, and Nehemiah is at the end, because in many volumes of the Ketuvim, of the Writings, Chronicles, in almost all modern printings, I believe, Chronicles comes after. It’s Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, but in many of the earlier manuscripts, Chronicles comes before Psalms. So, you know this is a manuscript that, Chronicles is on page 105B, followed by Psalms, followed by Job, followed by Proverbs, and even the order of what we call the Five Scrolls; Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther, that’s not uniform across all the manuscripts. So, you know an awful lot about what’s in this manuscript.

David: In the order, yeah.

Nehemia: Without knowing even what’s on each page, just from the book order, you can exclude a whole bunch of manuscripts.

David: But the most important thing is that it’s missing the middle. It’s like a bread sandwich; you’ve got Torah and Ketuvim, but nothing in the middle. There’s no Prophets.

Nehemia: It’s missing the peanut butter and jelly.

David: It’s missing the peanut butter… [laughter], Nehemia, my sandwich…

Nehemia: That tells you my generation. Okay.

David: Right. Maybe get a little meat in there. But whatever it is, the Prophets, you’re totally missing it. And so, the reason this is weird is because I could understand missing the Writings. You start with the first section, you get to the second section, and then you end. The scribe gets tired. I can understand the Prophets and the Writings. You say, “Everyone has a Torah. Let me write the rest.” But I don’t understand, and I’ve never heard of… to this day, I’ve never heard of a single book like this where you have the bread sandwich; you’ve got the Torah, you’ve got the Ketuvim, but you don’t have the Prophetsin the middle.

Nehemia: This is worth dwelling on for a minute. It was exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages, let’s say before printing, to have a manuscript that had the whole Tanakh. In other words, the Aleppo Codex is actually a very unusual book, very unusual volume, in that it had the entire Tanakh. The Leningrad Codex, very unusual; it had the entire Tanakh. Our earliest undisputed complete manuscript of anything of the Tanakh in the book form, codex, is what they call Codex Petropolitanis Babylonicus, which is in the Russian National Library, from the year 916 CE. Meaning, it has a date on it and that date isn’t disputed, that’s what I mean. There’s an older one, but the date has been called into question. And it’s only the… I want to say it’s the… is it the Latter Prophets? I don’t remember. I have to pull it up on ihbmr.com.

David: Yeah, Latter Prophets.

Nehemia: Okay, so, we have it actually here.

David: Meaning, the “prophet Prophets,” right?

Nehemia: Right. In other words… so, I’m here on ihbmr.com, which is the website of the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research.

David: Which, by the way, is changing the field. Nehemia probably doesn’t want to boast, but his little website here is not so little. It is… people are using it every single day, and it is amazing.

Nehemia: Okay. So, here we have…

David: On the right.

Nehemia: Yeah. And look, there’s a lot of people involved in this. It’s not just my little website at this point. There’s a lot of people working on it. So, we click on Codex P. So, here we have, Codex P, which is also known as Babylonicus Petropolitius. You mentioned ABE Books; I bought this volume for about 300 dollars on ABE Books in like, I don’t know, 2017 or something. Because I realized that this manuscript was unavailable, but it had been printed in the 1870s…

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: … with an early kind of lithographic technology that was, I believe, photographic. I wouldn’t assume everything on the actual manuscript is here, meaning, they might have cleaned up the plates when they printed it. I don’t know. And they certainly added the verse numbers, right? That somebody wrote in pencil or something, or in pen, wrote by hand on the printing plates or on the photographs, maybe, I don’t know, before they printed it. So, it starts in Isaiah. So, this is our earliest complete manuscript with an undisputed date. And it goes on page 224R, which is also called here A, right? Because Jews prefer A and B.

David: Right, because we’re doing the A’s and the B’s.

Nehemia: By the way, R and V technically is wrong, because R is recto, which means the right side, which makes sense in a Latin manuscript, but Hebrew is left-to-right. So, this isn’t the right side of the page, this is the left-side page. But many scholars today still use R and V, so we’re kind of stuck with that. Aleph and Bet is what we use in Hebrew, in any event. So, this was written in the year 916, and it ends with Malachi. So, where’s Joshua, which is part of the Prophets?

So, most biblical manuscripts don’t have the entire Tanakh, even ones that have the Prophets aren’t always the entire Prophets! And why is that? Because maybe the person who ordered it only had a certain amount of money or only had a certain interest. Maybe he had a different volume that had the Torah, and what we call the Former Prophets; Joshua through Kings. We don’t know why, but you have a very unusual manuscript in your purple codex because it has the Torah and it has the Writings, but it doesn’t have the Prophets in the middle. That’s unusual!

David: The bread sandwich. That’s what we got.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: The bread sandwich. So…

Nehemia: The bread with the peanut butter and jelly missing, or the meat missing. The salami is missing, whatever you want to call it.

David: Right. So, you’ve got the beginning and the end. I’ve never heard of such a thing. And so, guess what? I said, the only person on earth that I can think of that would be interested in such a kind of book is Christian David Ginsburg. And I went back to his other major book, his introduction to all these manuscripts, and there was a manuscript which he didn’t really use for his Masorah, but it’s called The Earl of Leicester’s Codex. And The Earl of Leicester’s Codex has a Torah and a Ketuvim, but no Prophets.

So, I went on to the National Library of Israel on Ketiv, and I was able to semi-confirm my suspicions. I was able to find the codex, and if you could share, I’ll just show you what it looked like. We’re talking about different copies. This would be very good for our listeners to see here. This is what I saw. You can see here that there are six columns on these two pages. In between these two columns are supposed to be dozens and dozens of small notes, and on the tops and the bottoms of the page are supposed to be longer notes.

Nehemia: Those are the Masoretic notes.

David: Yeah, the Masoretic notes.

Nehemia: The Masorah Magna is the one on the top and the bottom, and sometimes the outer margins, and the Masoretic Parve, or the small Masorah, is between…

David: Right, but this photocopy, which was probably taken in the 1950s, it doesn’t capture anything.

Nehemia: So, this is a scan of a microfilm, although I’m actually not even sure that’s the case. In other words, this might be that somebody made a microfilm, and then they printed the micro… I know, because I’ve done this, and I’ve seen a lot of the things available. So, what they did is, at the National Library of Israel back when it was the Jewish National University Library, the JNUL, they had a machine that would print the microfilm using a Xerox machine. And so, it could be this is a printed Xerox of a microfilm that was then scanned. That might be what this is, I’m not sure.

David: So, somebody told me, and I don’t remember who, it theoretically could have been you, Nehemia. It could have been Prof. Ofer. Somebody hinted to me that this book that we’re looking at, I had found the book, because the pages match up, but I couldn’t see them…

Nehemia: Wait a minute, wait a minute. So, when it has page, well, 1A, obviously, right? But when it has page 71B, that had numbers 9 and 2 on it…

David: No, but look, Nehemia, 1A, what’s on 1A? Go up, go to the top. What’s 1A?

Nehemia: 1A is Genesis 40 verse 1. Oh.

David: Oh, it’s not Genesis 1:1.

Nehemia: So, the numbering took place after… well that’s normal. Meaning, the numbering is usually done by librarians. But when it was numbered, the first 39 chapters of Genesis were already missing. Okay.

David: Why don’t we scroll down, and what does it say?

Nehemia: And by the way, it’s normal, in my books, in my bookshelf, right, to have the beginning and end of a book missing, and that was normal in manuscripts as well.

David: Right. And what do we have? Here we have 84V to 85 with no visible Masorah, but this was going to be, if you scroll down, this book was put up for auction by Christie’s in the summer that I…

Nehemia: Wait, is this the same page?

David: Yep.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. So, we can’t see the Masorah here. You can kind of see traces maybe of something here, but here you can see there clearly is, again, that the bottom and top and these outer margins is what’s called Masorah Magna or the Large Masorah, Masorah Hagdola. And then in between the margins, and then… in here…

David: Zoom in.

Nehemia: Ah, okay, we can zoom in. We have what’s called the Masorah Parva, or the Small Masorah, and then generally, these large notes at the top and bottom, and in this case in the outer margins, are often the details of what these small notes are. In other words, there’ll be a note that says, I don’t know, a certain form appears three times, and then it might give you the details of what those three times are, in these outer margins.

David: Right, the Ginsburg notes. And so, right here, all of a sudden, we have on the Christie’s website, the summer that I bought my book (my birthday was in July) the summer I bought my book is the summer that this went up for auction for, I believe, one-and-a-half million pounds

Nehemia: Wow! Okay. So, you didn’t buy this one, right?

David: So, the Earl of Leicester… by the way, this book, we were talking about book collecting, right?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: This book was bought by the Earl of Leicester on a trip to Italy, I believe. And he came back with two books in his bag. You ready? You want to know what the two books were?

Nehemia: What were they?

David: It was this and a little tiny notebook of Leonardo da Vinci’s.

Nehemia: Wow.

David: The little one cost something like four ducats and this one cost something like 12 ducats.

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, this was centuries ago, right? What century was this? Do we know?

David: This is from the 1200s.

Nehemia: No, no, no. What century did the Earl of Leicester travel to Italy?

David: It could be late 1700s, early 1800s.

Nehemia: Okay, and guys, I was just in Rome with my wife, and I remarked, you know, centuries ago, European nobility would do what they called something like the great travel, or the great trip, I forget what it was called. But it would be this thing where they would travel to all the major cities in Europe and they would do it once in their lifetime. And we hopped on a plane to go do manuscript research at the Vatican, and we got to spend a few days touring around, and I’m like, “Do you realize how blessed we are? Like, the richest people in the world centuries ago got to do this once in their lifetime, and here we are, on this tour, with like these middle class people, like plumbers and, you know, and bible scholars, right, and we get to do it today like it’s almost… not that it’s nothing, it’s still a big deal… but I don’t have to be an earl in order to do that.” So, he travels to Italy and he comes back with two books that he bought.

David: Two books. This book and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, which would be, eventually, the world’s most expensive book ever sold, to Bill Gates.

Nehemia: Wow. More expensive than the Sassoon Codex?

David: Sassoon dethroned that book.

Nehemia: Okay. So, up until the sale of the Sassoon Codex for 38.1 million dollars, that was…

David: The Earl of Leicester number one… this is Holkham Hall number two, this is the…

Nehemia: Ah, this is Earl Leicester manuscript number 2, okay.

David: Okay. So, let’s scroll down and just see the confirmation, if you go down one little bit. So, you see over here, in this note, number 44 in Ginsburg, the word is… it’s kind of cut off on the right-hand side, me’od me’od, and then it says on the left-hand side, there’s a purple note, 10A on Exodus 1:7. What does that all mean? What that means is, we should be able to open up this manuscript to Exodus 1:7 and see the notes in action. So, let’s scroll down here…

Nehemia: Let me explain the note though, just so… I want people to understand this. So, this is the letter Mem…

David: Yes.

Nehemia: Right. So, Ginsburg had something like little note cards, I imagine, and he arranged them alphabetically. And then he says, “Note 44 under Mem is the note b’me’od me’od, which means the phrase very, very.”

David: And this phrase is unique.

Nehemia: “Appears six times in Scripture.” And the importance of this note is that, if somebody’s copying this, and they might think that this is a scribal error called dittography; the previous scribe copied the word very twice. I’m going to leave one of them off. Or maybe he’s proofreading it, and he leaves one of them off, and he says, “Oh, no! Normally it’s only says very, but six times it says very, very, and I’m missing a very.” And so, he goes and he checks the six places, and he sees either “I’m missing one” or “I have them all.” Right? Or maybe a later reader checks them. It’s this method, or this system, to make sure Scripture is copied in the Hebrew text as perfectly as possible in accordance with the Masorah, which is the transmission. Right?

David: Exactly.

Nehemia: And there’s a debate about whether there’s one Masorah or multiple Masorahs. We won’t get into that.

David: Right. So, even if it’s a little bit different, even though it’s doubled, just keep it. You might not think there should be a Bet in the front. Keep it. Just let it be, let it be. And so, we’re going to expect, if we open up the Earl of Leicester’s Codex, which is now called Holkham Hall 2, to Exodus 1:7…

Nehemia: Is Holkham Hall where the Earl of Leicester has his palace?

David: My family were thinking of going to England in the coming year for a week. We’re trying to get a trip to Leicester, but it’s pretty far from London, so we’ll see. But if you scroll down, let’s take a look in… this is a photo that I was actually able to get. Christie’s shared with me… Actually no, this was on the website. I didn’t even have the special permission yet. And you can see we’re on 10A, which is where it should be. We’re on Exodus 1:7, and it says b’me’od me’od; there’s the letter Vav, which is our note six times. And then the bottom part, if you scroll down just a little bit, will be the six occurrences.

Nehemia: Oh, b’me’od me’od, six times…

David: At this time Nehemia, Iam jumping for joy, jumping for joy. You, even though you were waiting for this article to come out, you were, every month or so, we would be in touch, or two months, or so, and you saw some of this happening in real time. And so, what happened was, is that I now knew that Christian David Ginsburg had been using this codex and going through its masorah to try and understand where it fits in to his…

Nehemia: David, here’s something worth looking into. I don’t know if you looked at this. You notice there’s two number 10s here. Obviously, this was numbered at two different times. Do those two numbers (you don’t have to answer now, but it’s worth looking at) do they match all the way through the end of the codex? Because sometimes when they renumbered it, they made a mistake…

David: Right.

Nehemia: …in one of them, or they corrected a mistake. And do Ginsburg’s match one of these over the other if they don’t always match? Right? At the beginning, they’re going to match, right? But when you get to page 5, you know, folio, I don’t know, 400, 500, however high it goes, or 200, do they still match? That would be worth looking at.

David: Right.

Nehemia: That’d be interesting.

David: Well, we can do that now. So, the good news is, I was able to… Christie’s, I told them that, “Hey, I’m a scholar at JTS, and I’m working on this manuscript.” They told me the library which is affiliated with the new owner of the manuscript. And I was able to contact the new owner, who wished to be anonymous, and I was able to contact him. And when I reached out to him, he said, “Oh, you’re from JTS? I’ve been wanting to come to your library, because the book I just bought was written by the same scribe as one of your most important books.”

Nehemia: What?

David: Yeah, so if you scroll down, we can actually see…

Nehemia: Guys, I’ve heard this story before, but every time I hear it, I’m still amazed. Oh, can you tell this story?

David: Yeah, so, what we’re looking at is what I originally thought was Codex Leviticus. Because it starts with an L, it has a T in the middle.

Nehemia: And you’re like, “What other word would it be? It has to be some word I’m familiar with.”

David: Right, it has to be… And that’s just the mind playing tricks. Right? Don’t believe your mind. You need to get a person…

Nehemia: No, but this is actually how people read alphabetic text. I mean, look at the word Massachusetts. You don’t say, “Oh, there’s an M, and there’s an A, and there’s an S.” No, you read the word Massachusetts. And if it’s misspelled, you still read it. Right?

David: Right.

Nehemia: And in this case, the word Leicester, which is spelled “lie-kester” for an American.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Lester, they pronounce it. You don’t know that word. Well, what’s Leicester? You know, it’s….

David: Right, yeah.

Nehemia: It’s like, I was just listening to something yesterday on the history of Texas, and they mentioned Nacogdoches. And the person, the narrator didn’t know how to pronounce it. Right? He’s like, nag-chido… like some weird pronunciation. All right. I lived for a while in Behar County, which is spelled B-E-H-A-R, right? Meaning, if you don’t know that word, then you think, “Oh, I know a word; Leviticus. And there’s the tus.” But that’s…

David: Right. So, I just assumed it was Codex Leviticus…

Nehemia: So, you did all this investigation, and the answer was right… is this in purple? I can’t tell.

David: Yeah, it’s in purple.

Nehemia: So, you had the answer the whole time! It’s just written in a script that’s hard… or it’s a word you’re not familiar with, I suppose.

David: Right. And if you scroll down, Christian David Ginsburg wrote a set of notes for the codex with the paper that was cut to the size of the codex, and they sewed it into the binding.

Nehemia: Wow!

David: So, not only is this book being used by Ginsburg, this book has Ginsburg in it.

Nehemia: Wow!

David: It’s really amazing how these things are coming together.

Nehemia: So, basically, does he sign his name here? Or do you just know the handwriting?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end, it says Christian David Ginsburg. Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. So, this is a sort of, you know, “Ginsburg was here”. He added some pages… it’s more than one page, right?

David: And he just goes through the Masorah of each one, almost like he does in his introduction book.

Nehemia: Wait. So, are these notes about the Masorah?

David: Yeah. They’re primarily about the number of verses in each book, and where’s the middle verse, and things like that.

Nehemia: So, this is an unpublished mini treatise of Ginsburg, or notes of Ginsburg, is what you’re saying.

David: Yeah. I wouldn’t say treatise; almost like a commentary.

Nehemia: Okay. That should be your next article, by the way. It should be. No, it absolutely should be.

David: I have some ideas for the next one, but it won’t be me. Maybe it’ll be you. So, we’ll talk after.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: Okay. So, if we keep going down, what we see here is that JTS has a copy of… There was a scholar in Oxford named Judith Olszowy-Schlanger. Did I pronounce that right, Nehemia?

Nehemia: I’m not going to attempt to pronounce a name in Polish. I pronounce it “Olshovi”, but I don’t know. She is at Oxford. She was at Oxford. She is my supervisor at the Accord Pratique de Hôtitude, where I am officially doing a postdoc, so…

David: So, she, Nehemia, is very involved in…

Nehemia: She is the world’s foremost active paleographer of Hebrew.

David: And so, when she actually was hired by Christie’s to evaluate the book, she noticed that the handwriting is strikingly similar to the handwriting and the style of Masorah, the notes that we have of Yisrael HaSofar, Israel the scribe, who wrote a book, a Torah, at JTS in the year 1241.

Nehemia: So, guys, this is important. We don’t have the beginning of the Earl of Leicester Codex, and we don’t have the end, because they were lost, apparently, (even before the numbering, the first 39 chapters of Genesis were lost) and so, we don’t know who the scribe was, except you’re saying that Judith Schlanger identified the handwriting from something where we do have the name of the scribe. Okay. Oh, and this is L44A; that’s not just some manuscript. That in Masoretic studies is one of the most important manuscripts. Okay.

David: So, what we have over here is our rare book librarian, Mordecai Schwartz, on the right-hand side…

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: …and he is looking through some of the Masoretic material in the JTS copy from the year 1241. And then I am on the left side looking through the Earl of Leicester’s codex, the Holkham Hall 2, and we’re looking, and it’s just the same thing. Meaning, the way he wrote one of them is the way he wrote the other. It was almost like carbon copies, in a certain sense.

Nehemia: And for those listening, guys, they’re looking here at these Masoretic lists. In other words, if it’s the biblical text, how else would you write the biblical text? But here, it’s a Masoretic list. So, we have the large Masorah, the small Masorah on the page, and then at the end, and sometimes the beginning of manuscripts, you have these Masoretic lists. And he has, sort of, like, a decoration around the side written with words. And they look very similar, at least in this very small photo. But you’re saying the actual content was the same as well?

David: Yeah. So, it was the handwriting, the content, the order. It was almost like if you were to make… Like, let’s say you had your dish, right? You know, whatever dish you’re making, you would make it similar two times in a row. It’s kind of what he’s doing here. He’s doing the same thing, presenting it in the same way, even though they were different books. We were able to, if you scroll down, we were able to get it digitized.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. Here you’re with Ardon Bar-Hama, the famous…

David: Ardon Bar-Hama, the superstar of photography, of manuscripts, who did the Aleppo Codex, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Greek Codex Vaticanus, and other things. And so, this is him doing it. He did it very quickly and very well, and maybe, Nehemia, maybe we’ll talk, perhaps in the next year or so. We could get a number of these manuscripts together to join your website at one time.

Nehemia: Let’s do it now. As soon as we get off, send me the images and I’ll put them up. I need permission.

David: No, no, we can do it, like, maybe with a press conference…

Nehemia: Oh, okay. We should absolutely do that.

David: Yeah. All right. And so, if you scroll down, so, this is now, I think…

Nehemia: Wow! Okay. Do you want to talk about this? This is amazing.

David: All right. And so, now we’ll see that what makes this particular manuscript different is that in…

Nehemia: Hold on a second. So, 44A is above. So, this is a very famous thing about the JTS manuscript, which is that… So, we mentioned the journal is called Sfarad, which means Spain, and there was a very famous manuscript in Spain. It was famous centuries ago, meaning, it’s not just famous today, and it was called the Hilleli Codex. And here he has a note in your JTS 44A manuscript that says, chazina, I think that’s be’hilleli, “I saw in the Hilleli Codex” and then some detail that he saw. Okay.

David: And so, this is a very rare phenomenon, to say, “I have seen.”

Nehemia: Right.

David: Because most of the time, you’re just presenting what’s come before you; you don’t necessarily say, “I matter.” You don’t matter. So, it’s almost like you just present what you have. And here he’s saying, “I’ve seen in the Hilleli Codex, which is lost.” How important is the Hilleli Codex? I don’t know. If it was around today, would it be more important?

Nehemia: Well, it wasn’t lost at this time. In other words, in the early 13th century, he has access to what he believes to be a very important manuscript, which has a textual variant. Now, guys, the textual variant here is the word tidru, you will make an oath, with a dagesh or without a dagesh. Right? So, in other words, something like the difference between tid’ru or tithhru. Right. So, it doesn’t necessarily have all that significance, but to him, wanting to copy the text perfectly, whether there’s a dot in the Dalet, or not a dot in the Dalet, that’s what we’re ultimately talking about. He wants to perfectly preserve it, and he says, “I’m going to put a dot here, but I saw in this very important manuscript that it didn’t have the dot” And this is presumably the testimony of Israel the Scribe, that you mentioned before, Yisrael Hasofer.

David: Right. And the same exact note, if you scroll down, is present in the JTS one.

Nehemia: What’s interesting is not just that it’s the same note I saw in Hilleli, it’s… he uses the specific word. He could have written ra’iti ba’Hilleli,or there’s a bunch of other words he could have used, right? He’s using the specific Aramaic form to say, “I saw”, right, so, that’s evidently his style.

David: Right.

Nehemia: That’s significant.

David: And we’ve gone on a lot of tangents, but here’s another one. Theoretically, Nehemia, this could theoretically be… what we’re seeing is the dawn of a new keri and ketiv. What he’s saying is, “I wrote what I saw, but I know that in this more important manuscript, they’re doing it this way.”

Nehemia: Well, I don’t know that it’s more important. In other words, he’s saying, “This is what I have in my text I’m copying from, so I’m going to reproduce it, but there’s a textual variant I’m aware of from a very important manuscript.” I think if it was more important, it would be in the body of the text, one could argue.

David: No, no, no! That’s because this is the Masoretic way; you don’t change, that’s the way. You keep it. That’s the whole point.

Nehemia: In other words, he’s… it’s almost like he’s saying, “I’m copying the mistake, but here’s what it should say, but I don’t dare change it.”

David: Exactly. He’s saying, “In the Hilleli, this is…” right.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

David: Exactly.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And so, this was it. And so, the book came…

Nehemia: You say… this is a huge discovery, right? In other words, not only did you find Ginsburg’s personal copy, which included notes of what his sources were in, I guess, at least three manuscripts?

David: Well, these weren’t his sources. I was able to figure out these were post-encyclopedia. His book came out; he was now analyzing these books to see how much of them is in his stuff.

Nehemia: Ah, so, in other words, if I ever make a second edition, I have more sources for it.

David: So, what did we learn? So, we now get to talk about the Masorah, that we talked about, and if Ginsburg is correct, it means that he looked at the Earl of Leicester’s Codex and he found 97 percent of its notes were in his Masorah.

Nehemia: Yeah, but not the other way around.

David: Not the other way around, but that means 3 percent of his notes were not in the Masorah. These were new to him.

Nehemia: Hold on a second. So, 3 percent of the notes in the Earl of Leicester’s Codex are not in his Masorah.

David: So, what that means is that, if Ginsburg would have been updating the Masorah, he would have added a whole bunch…

Nehemia: Some more notes.

David: Right. But 97 percent, I think, is a lot to be able to say the Masorah, as opposed to necessarily the Masorahs alone. We all know there’s Masorahs. Each manuscript is different. But there’s also like a body in Ginsburg that shows you that, like, a huge chunk is where most manuscripts are going to be getting their stuff.

Nehemia: So, there’s two different questions here. I don’t know that we’re going to get so much into this, because this is very complicated. But basically, it’s worth noting there’s two different questions. One is, and let’s go back and look at one of these Masoretic notes, okay? And actually, could you explain what this note is here? And what’s the significance of this Kaf volume? So, here you have a note from your personal copy. Tell us about this note.

David: Well, this was me basically saying that the Kaf Manuscript doesn’t match up with my manuscript.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: So, my manuscripts are not the ones mentioned in Kaf…

Nehemia: Oh, this is important. Start here and tell us what this is.

David: Yeah. So, one more time. In Cambridge, there’s this manuscript on the letter Kaf. And this letter, in that little bit, that manuscript of 100 pages, Ginsburg tells you his… some of his sources for each note. But those notes… for example, at the top, if you look at note 415 on the letter Kaf, his source is this manuscript called ADD, additional, 15250, and then Folio 320B. That’s his source. But when you look at my note on that Kaf, I get 238A. So, my notes are not being used for the Kaf manuscript, meaning my notes are something different.

Nehemia: So, guys, this is important. So, Ginsburg has the four volumes. Which volume has the Aleph through Yud? I don’t remember. Is that one of those four?

David: One, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, he has the Hebrew, and in the Hebrew text, under the letter Kaf, he has what he calls rubric, right? In other words, here’s Masoretic List 415. It has the word va’kha’as, and it’s twice in Scripture. And what are the two instances in Scripture? Psalm 10:14 and Ecclesiastes 2:23 have the word va’kha’as with that exact form. But he doesn’t tell you what manuscript he got that from.

In the English sort of dictionary, or decipherment, of which Aleph through Yud were published, and only Kaf exists now in manuscript form. Although Prof. Ofer is working on an edition of it; he has the note. Here it’s interesting; he writes Tav–Yud–Hey instead of Tav-Tet-Vav. That’s interesting. So, I wonder if the Tav-Tet-Vav was the innovation of the printer, who’s like, “I’m not writing Yud–Hey… that’s God’s name.” That’s interesting.

Anyway, so, he says, “This rubric, which does not,” what does that say, “occur in the printed Masorah is…” So, in other words, he has a Masoretic rubric, or list, that doesn’t appear in the printed Masorah. What does he mean by the printed Masorah? He doesn’t mean his copy, obviously not. What does he mean?

David: I believe…

Nehemia: So, presumably he means of, like, Eliyahu B’chur or something like this. Or some other scholar.

David: Perhaps. No, I think he means this, in volume two. He means this.

Nehemia: No, but here it is printed, so… So, he must mean some other collection of Masorah. Somebody has to figure out what that means.

David: Yeah, okay.

Nehemia: “It does not occur in the print of Masorah, it’s from…” So, in other words, he’s saying, “I brought you this, even though if you look at standard printings of the Masorah, you won’t have that.” And that is, his source isn’t from the printed Masorah, it’s from manuscript ADD 15250, which is in the British Library today, and it’s on page 320B. And in your note, it’s 238A. What color is that? Is that purple?

David: Purple.

Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, he has a second source. So, here we have a chronology of these documents. In other words, the Kaf volume presumably was written before… I think we can even say something different here (and we have to verify this) but I would say, the first of these to be produced was this English, the second was this printed volume of the Masorah. Because when he’s saying, “in the printed Masorah”, it seems to me, somebody should verify this, but seems to me he’s not referring to his printed Masorah, but like a standard printed Masorah. Right? And then, he’s therefore giving you the source, which is this manuscript, and it’s a different manuscript than what he writes here. So, the chronology of these are: one is the Kaf volume in English, two, his printing of the Masorah, and three, the notes he added to the printing. If I’m right. I don’t know if I’m right. It’s…

David: Yeah…

Nehemia: We have to verify that.

David: We could look at that very easily, but I think what he’s just saying is, “I didn’t give you the source in the printed Masorah.” I think that’s what he’s saying.

Nehemia: Okay. We’ll save that for our future research.

David: Okay, so, if you scroll down, I think we’re done with this manuscript. Yeah.