The Tiberian Masoretes and the Aleppo Codex: the text of the Tanakh takes form

A Torah scroll is written without vowels: how to read a word was known by mouth. While transmission was face to face that sufficed; in dispersion it ceased to. From the eighth century families of Masoretes—"keepers of the tradition"—worked in Tiberias, doing three things at once: setting the vowels, setting the cantillation signs, which also mark the syntax, and keeping count—how many verses, words and letters in a book, which letter stands in the middle, where the written form differs from the read.

The work was completed in the Ben Asher family. About 930 Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher pointed and supplied the masorah for a manuscript written by Shlomo ben Buya'a—the Aleppo Codex, the Keter Aram Tzova. Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah cites it as the model of a correct scroll, and its authority rests on that.

The book's course: Jerusalem, Cairo (where Maimonides used it), and from the fourteenth century Aleppo, where it was guarded for six hundred years. In 1947 the synagogue burned in a riot; the codex survived, but nearly the whole Torah was lost—294 leaves remain of roughly 487. In 1958 it was smuggled to Jerusalem.

Present-day editions of the Tanakh restore what is missing from the Leningrad Codex (1010), the earliest complete Hebrew Bible, also of the Ben Asher tradition.