Lethargic Man (anag.)

After years of reading my way through first the Hertz and Cohen chumash commentaries every year, then (from 2004) that in the Etz Chayim, I got bored and started seeking out new commentaries to read during the yearly Torah reading cycle, which was easy when the minyan I davened with, Assif, mostly met in my shul's library. After reading a few from traditional authors, who I can't now really remember (Nachmanides was one, I think), I diversified, and read (and blogged) my way through the Samaritan version of the Torah, in an edition with the differences from the Masoretic Text highlighted.

After moving to Germany, I read my way through R. Ludwig Philippson's 1844 translation of the Torah for the 2016–2017 Torah reading cycle, then spent the following six and a half years reading his commentary. (This was the first complete book I ever read in German; that's why it took me so long.)

Having finished that, my new project is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which contains the text of the Leningrad Codex with footnotes (in Latin (!)) giving variant readings in all known manuscript traditions, including Latin and Greek ones, for which the Hebrew is sometimes^* reconstructed.

* But, annoyingly, for someone with no Greek beyond the mere ability to read the letters) not always.

So far I've only got as far as פַּרְשַׁת לֶךְ־לְךָ, but a few things are already beginning to emerge:

There have been few differences from the MT thus far which I have not already seen in the Samaritan text. As an example, in place of the MT's "God drove out the human, and placed to the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim with a flaming sword &c" the Septuagint has "God drove out the human, and placed him at the east of the garden of Eden, and the cherubim with a flaming sword &c". The ages of the generations between Adam and Abraham also vary from the MT.

The Masoretic Text is often thought of as being monolithic; the reality is that it too has minor variations between manuscripts. Having spotted a few places in Gen. 14 where a דָגֵשׁ was missing in some manuscripts, for example in the שׂ of עֵמֶק הַשִּׂדִּים in verse 10, also כְּדָרְלָעֹמֶר being two words (joined with a מַקַף) in one place, I was intrigued to see whether other chumashim reflected this. I found the Etz Chayim did; a little investigation reveals it uses the Leningrad Codex as the basis of its Hebrew text. Intriguingly, Wikipedia reveals that Hebrew Bibles frequently use the (reconstructed, where necessary) Aleppo Codex as their basis in preference to the Leningrad Codex.

Both the Hertz chumash and Philippson do not, however, have the דָגֵשִׁים missing, nor the word break in כְּדָרְלָעֹמֶר. The latter turns out to use the Hebrew text of Meir Halevi Letteris, the former that of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which turns out to be based on Letteris' text. (The first edition of Philippson precedes Letteris' text by several years; it's not clear to me where Philippson got his Hebrew text from.)

I look forward to seeing in a few weeks if there's any difference between the two codices for one of the few early pages from the Aleppo Codex which has been photographed.