‡ Hebrew Bible, Amos 5:7-7:11, manuscript on parchment [Oriental, tenth or eleventh century]

‡ Hebrew Bible, Amos 5:7-7:11, manuscript on parchment [Oriental (Near East), tenth or eleventh century] Single large square leaf, with three columns of 22 lines of large square script with nikkud, Masora magna above text and Masorah parva below text, small Masorah inserted between the columns, small stains and tears to edges, else excellent condition and on fine and heavy parchment, 395 by 350mm. Provenance:1. Most probably from the famous Cairo Genizah, the repository of the Jewish community located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat (established in 882 AD.). This storehouse of obsolete books fell into disuse and was forgotten until renovations to the building in 1891 opened the hoard and released some leaves onto the antiquities market. The linguist Archibald Sayce was in Cairo in 1892, and records that the Genizah was being dispersed leaf-by-leaf to dealers and collectors. Sayce repeatedly attempted to acquire the entire collection for the Bodleian, but the negotiations fell through, and he left Cairo blaming the constant inebriation of the local officials for the failure of his attempt. Subsequently, a leaf from the long-lost Hebrew version of Ecclesiasticus found its way via the redoubtable twins and early Bible hunters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, to the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter. He mounted a rescue mission and acquired the remaining 140,000 fragments for Cambridge University. The discovery captivated public imagination in Europe in a way comparable only to the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922. For half a century, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, these were the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known.2. Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London, their MS 1630: acquired from Quaritch, November 1992. A sister leaf with Amos 7:11-9:8 was sold in the Schøyen sale at Sotheby's on 10 July 2012, lot 12, for £42,000, and another in our rooms with parts of Zechariah and Malachi, 10 July 2018, lot 6 for £37,500. Text:This is a noble relic of one of the earliest surviving codices of the Hebrew Bible. Its text is set in three columns and it is nearly square, the oldest extant codex format, echoing early papyrus codices, and perhaps fixed in this format from the cutting up of Ancient scrolls and binding them together down one edge. The earliest surviving Hebrew biblical books date to the ninth or tenth century, such as the surviving parts of the Aleppo Codex (c. 920, now Jerusalem, Shrine of the Book), the Damascus Pentateuch (c. 1000; also Jerusalem, Hebrew University), the St. Petersberg Codex (dated 1008/09, now National Library of Russia, MS.B19a), British Library, Or. 4445 (Pentateuch only, tenth-century), and the near complete ninth- or tenth-century codex, ex D.S. Sassoon, sold in Sotheby's, 5 December 1989, lot 69, for £2,035,000. These are the fundamental witnesses to the format of the text as selected by the Masoretic scholar, Aaron Ben-Asher (d. c. 960), in Tiberias, modern Palestine. The resulting text was accepted by Maimonides as the most accurate, and remains in use today. The late Professor Chimen Abramsky assigned the script of this leaf to the scribe of the tenth-century British Library, Or. 4445, and the lack of a eulogistic acronym for Aaron Ben-Asher in that manuscript has been taken as an indication that Ben-Ascher was alive at the time it was written. Moreover, Kahle has suggested that Or. 4445 was the work of Ben-Asher himself in the early period of his work on the text (The Cairo Genizah, 1959, pp.117-18), placing the scribe of this leaf within the circle of Ben-Asher himself, at one of the formative stages of the Hebrew Bible.