No replies to this topic

[Kay]

Last update - 15:55 06/11/2007

Fragment of ancient parchment from Bible given to Jerusalem scholars

By Anshel Pfeffer

"An eight-centimeter-square piece of the 1087-year-old Aleppo Codex will be given to a representative of the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem on Thursday, following 18 years during which Israeli scholars tried to retrieve it from businessman Sam Sabbagh.

Sabbagh salvaged the fragment from a burning synagogue in Aleppo, Syria in 1947.

Inscribed on both sides, it is one of the lost fragments of the codex, a copy of the Bible written in 920 C.E. in Tiberias by the scribe Shlomo Ben Buya'a. The fragment Sabbagh had bears verses of Exodus chapter 8, including the words of Moses to Pharaoh: "Let my people go, that they may serve me..."
...

The Aleppo synagogue in which the codex had been kept was burned down exactly 60 years ago by an enraged mob, following the United Nations decision to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The fate of the Codex was subsequently unknown for 10 years. It had disappeared from the locked cabinet in which it had been kept for centuries, and many believed it had burned together with 40 Torah scrolls, some of them ancient."

Full Article