The Mystery of Georgia’s Millennium-Old Pentateuch

Around the 8th century, Jewish scribes in the Land of Israel and Babylonia began producing codices—handwritten, bound books—of the Hebrew Bible, complete with markings to denote vowels, how the text should be chanted, punctuation, chapter divisions, and marginal notes for future scribes. Unlike scrolls, these were for study rather and reference rather than ritual use. One of the oldest, and certainly the most famous, of these is the Aleppo Codex, which—after being carefully safeguarded for centuries by Syrian Jews—now only exists in fragments, which do not include most of the Five Books of Moses.