Contents:
A leaf of the codex survives at 15,234 of near-Aleppo's 23,202 verses (65.7%), and none survives at 7,968 (34.3%), as MAM-basics' index of the codex's surviving text gives them, each of its ranges read as including both its ends. The codex is lost entire in 13 books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Obadiah, Jonah, Haggai, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. It is lost in part in 8 books, where the table shows, and survives whole in the others.
| Book | Verses lost | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Deuteronomy | 731 | 1:1–28:16 |
| 2 Kings | 119 | 14:22–18:12 |
| Jeremiah | 86 | 29:10–31:34, 32:15–18 |
| Amos | 17 | 8:13–9:15 |
| Micah | 55 | 1:1–4:14 |
| Zechariah | 137 | 1:1–9:16 |
| Psalms | 170 | 15:1–25:1 |
| Song of Songs | 72 | 4:1–8:14 |
Near-Aleppo applies its general editorial policies at every verse. Where a leaf is lost, MAM's notes may still cite evidence of the codex's contents: testimony to its lost parts, under sigla such as א(ס), or photographs of its pages taken before they were lost. Near-Aleppo treats testimony and photographs as evidence of the codex's text. MAM's notes may also cite the codex's method, שיטת-א, whose inferred forms near-Aleppo admits only where the codex is lost. MAM-with-doc's decoding of the sigla says what each means. The clauses of MAM's notes that differ from MAM's text cite testimony or a photograph 44 times, in 36 clauses, all where the codex is lost, and 13 such clauses name the codex's method.
Near-Aleppo is an editorial approximation. MAM's notes do not record every manuscript departure from a general policy. Editorial guesses where Aleppo is lost remain uncertain.
What near-Aleppo cannot know, or does not yet do, where it therefore differs from the codex:
| Limitation | What it means |
|---|---|
| Rafe | The codex marks the rafe in many places where MAM does not, and how many is not known. The manuscripts use the rafe inconsistently (Yeivin, ITM §397), so near-Aleppo does not derive the missing ones by rule, which would give them a regularity the manuscripts lack. Near-Aleppo has fewer rafe marks than the codex. |
| The holam in the divine name | MAM's notes record the codex's holam in the divine name at 5 words, and MAM does not say that they are every such place. So near-Aleppo is right in general, and wrong wherever the codex has a holam that no note records. For the divine title MAM speaks only of isolated places, but its 438 words are few enough for a person to look through. |
| The maqaf | MAM's introduction says, citing Yeivin's study of the codex, that about 50 places in the codex lack a maqaf after a word that should have one, and gives no list. MAM's notes name 5 such places that near-Aleppo follows; it flags 1 Kings 20:29 without following it, and leaves 1 Chronicles 9:4, 2 Samuel 8:3, and 2 Kings 5:18 to later work on the ketiv/qere. The rest cannot be recovered from MAM. |
| The pointed ketiv | Near-Aleppo imports an approved frozen subset of inferred pointings where MAM's notes give none. These categorical selections are not certified correct; source-ownership and transfer warnings remain in the separate source archive. Inference faces the codex's convention of which letter a mark goes on, which MAM describes as usual rather than invariable, and which MAM says it records only in part, so that an inferred pointing can differ at an unknown number of sites. |
| The sparseness of the ketiv/qere | MAM declines to encode a ketiv/qere, as a policy, wherever the qere lacks only one mater lectionis, and near-Aleppo adds no encoding. So its ketiv/qere apparatus is sparser than the codex's, by an amount MAM's apparatus does not record. |
| The zarqa's stress helper | Near-Aleppo has no zarqa stress helper at 179 of the words where MAM has one, on Ben Denckla's assumption, not on an inspection, that the codex most likely has none of them; it keeps the one whose note records it in the codex. Where the codex is lost, the only evidence is that UXLC records none, and a stress helper is just the fine mark a transcription normalizes away. No manuscript has been read at any of those sites. |
| Special letters | At Job 16:14 and Job 7:5 the codex survives and MAM's notes say nothing about the special letter, so near-Aleppo has each word without it, as it does wherever it evaluates away a special-letter template: 46 in its text, and 1, Job 7:5's, in a ketiv. At Isaiah 44:14 MAM's small letter follows the codex's margin rather than its text. |
The near-Aleppo dataset documented here is a first version. Still to do:
At 10 sites in 9 verses where a leaf of the codex survives, MAM has a
מ:קו״כ-אם-2 whose note names another manuscript and says nothing
of the codex: 2 Samuel 11:24 (twice);
2 Kings 14:12;
Jeremiah 2:3,
32:35,
51:9; Ezekiel
40:37, 47:8,
48:18,
48:21. MAM's apparatus being silent, near-Aleppo keeps
each template and flags it, flagged-not-applied with the value “MAM's apparatus does
not say whether the codex has a qere note here”. The same flag stands at
Deuteronomy 29:22, where MAM implies without saying so
that the codex has no qere note, and the flag with the value “MAM's apparatus does not say whether
the codex has the maqaf here” stands at 2 Samuel 13:33,
at a maqaf after a ketiv that is not read.
Settling these sites by eye, in mgketer.org and in the Jerusalem Crown edition, is a tractable job, just not one done for this first version.