Damascus Pentateuch

History

The Damascus Pentateuch is a famous early Bible codex, largely because of the bibliophile David Solomon Sassoon, who acquired it in Damascus in the early 1900s. It is one of the oldest surviving Bible codices, comparable to the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. In many passages, the codex aligns with the traditions of the masorete Aaron ben Asher regarding plene and defective spelling, as well as most large and small letters, matching Ben-Asher’s Masoretic variants about 52 percent of the time. Following Ben Asher’s practice, the copyist writes the word פצוע דכא in Deuteronomy 23:2 with an aleph, writes תעשה in Exodus 25:31 in defective scriptum without a yod, and writes האפד in Exodus 28:26 in defective scriptum without a waw—all habits also typical of Aaron Ben Asher. The codex is made of parchment, with three columns per page, using a large, oriental square script common in the 9th century. Like other codices from that period, it includes micrography: the Masora Magna (large Masora) appears as notes at the top and bottom of each page, and the Masora Parva (small Masora) sits between the columns. Sassoon believed the Masora writer followed Ben Asher, but the Bible text itself—its spelling and vowel markings—follows Ben Naphtali and his school. Regarding age, Sassoon suggested the manuscript is likely older than the British Museum’s Oriental 4445, which is thought to date from around 820–850 CE and comes from Babylon. The text includes Tiberian vowel points, accents, and Rafeh strokes (a horizontal line above unaccented letters of בג״ד כפ״ת, and sometimes over an aleph, as on page 54 of volume 1 for ישראל in Genesis 32:28). The writer of the Masora marked the smaller weekly lection divisions, called Sedarim, throughout the codex with a large samekh (ס) in the margin and the Seder number below. The lettering style is archaic: the leg of the Hebrew letter qof (ק) connects to its roof, the he (ה) resembles the ḥet (ח) with little distinction, the lamed (ל) is unusually long and hooks outward, and the final nun (ן) looks almost identical to the letter zayn.