NOT SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF an Haaretz article (Searching for God's words," by Yair Sheleg) about the late Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, who had some idiosyncratic ideas about biblical criticism and "devoted his life to one impressive undertaking: determining the precise wording of the Bible." This seems to mean that he tried to reconstruct the Vorlage of the Masorah (the medieval vocalization and cantillation-marking of the surviving text of the Hebrew Bible).

For centuries, the Bible did not have any vowels or cantillation marks (Mesorah). These were added in the seventh to ninth centuries, mainly by scholars in Tiberias. For a long time, the Mesorah was transmitted orally from father to son, teacher to student. In the 10th century, a Mesorah expert named Aaron Ben-Asher, who is credited with writing the Aleppo Codex, recorded the marks.

Ostensibly, Breuer could have had a very useful tool in his search for a reliable version of the Mesorah, because large portions of the Aleppo Codex, from which Maimonides also gleaned the divisions that appear in his Mishneh Torah, arrived in Israel in 1958. The manuscript, preserved for many generations by the community in Aleppo, Syria, was damaged during the December 1947 pogroms there, following the UN resolution to establish Israel. Approximately two-thirds of its pages survived and were smuggled into Israel.

For Breuer, the problem was that the manuscript had been handed to the Hebrew University's Mifal Hamikra project, which did not agree to allow other researchers to share the asset. Due to lack of choice, Breuer embarked on a meticulous independent study: He took the five other most important Bible manuscripts (although newer than the Aleppo Codex) and began comparing them word for word, generally choosing what was written in the majority. Academia rejected this approach, his son says, "because the assumption was that the Mesorah did not have one agreed upon version, but that each of the important manuscripts reflected a different version." Breuer's work was perceived by academics as an "eclectic" combination. Breuer, however, thought there was one ancient version that could be revealed through the more recent copies.

And then he managed to get hold of facsimiles of the Aleppo Codex. The circumstances are unclear even to his son and his student, Ofer. The son knows only that "the day Dad came home with a copy of the Aleppo Codex, he was acting like an accomplice to a crime." There are several versions of his "accomplishment": some say the photocopies were given to him surreptitiously by someone with access to the Aleppo Codex; another, less likely, version says he simply approached the librarian of the Ben Zvi Institute, where the Aleppo Codex was being kept, and asked if they had another manuscript he had not seen, and the librarian innocently handed him photocopies of the Aleppo Codex. Meir Hovev, Breuer's friend, told Haaretz this week that Breuer said he received the copies from Shlomo Zalman Shragai, a Jewish Agency official who received the Aleppo Codex from the smuggler who brought it into Israel, and had kept some copies of its pages.

In any case, when Breuer reviewed the copies of the Aleppo Codex, he found his method was correct: Except for in two places, all the vowels and cantillation marks in the Aleppo Codex corresponded exactly with what he had reached through his independent, meticulous work. This information was not just a personal success but a research revolution: He proved there was one agreed upon version of the Mesorah, and that the Aleppo Codex reflected it. Otherwise, there would not have been a correlation between the majority of the other manuscripts and the Aleppo Codex, because the Aleppo Codex would have represented another Mesorah. Furthermore, this meant Breuer's work applied to the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex (most of the Pentateuch). Breuer then issued for Da'at Mikrah, and later independently, a version of the Bible that was quickly accepted as the most reliable and accurate.

The writer of this article seems to think that the Masoretic Text can be identified with the "precise wording of the Bible," so I don't have any great confidence in the article's perspective. I'm not a specialist in Masoretic studies, but if anyone is (an academic specialist, that is) and wants to comment, please drop me a note. (For the moment, use my jrd4 at st-andrews dot ac dot uk address. The blogger@ address above is down, but I hope to have it working again shortly.)