Institute to Get Ancient Bible Parchment
Pastor Dale Morgan
Institute to Get Ancient Bible Parchment*
By REGAN E. DOHERTY,
Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM - The family of man who held a fragment of a more than
1,000-year-old manuscript of the Hebrew Bible for six decades as a good
luck charm will present it to a Jerusalem institute next week, officials
said Thursday.
The parchment, about "the size of a credit card," is believed to be part
of the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo
Codex, said Michael Glatzer, academic secretary of the Yad Ben Zvi
institute. It contains verses from the Book of Exodus describing the
plagues in Egypt, including the words of Moses to Pharaoh, "Let my
people go, that they may serve me."
Sam Sabbagh, then a 17-year-old Syrian, picked up a piece of the
manuscript off the floor of a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria in 1947. The
synagogue had been burned the previous day in riots that followed the
decision by the United Nations to partition Palestine, a step to
creation of the Jewish state of Israel.
Sabbagh, who later immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, carried the
parchment around for years in a plastic pouch in his wallet, Glatzer
said. He used it as a good luck charm, even bringing it with him when he
underwent open heart surgery.
Yad Ben Zvi in Jerusalem is a Jewish studies institute named after
Israel's second president, who received the codex when it was smuggled
into Israel in 1958. The institute learned of the fragment's existence
about 20 ago and attempted to persuade Sabbagh to part with the fragment
_ to no avail.
After Sabbagh passed away two years ago, his family decided to donate it
to the institute.
The recovery "is important in the sense that we are getting the chance
to unify the missing parts and put them in their original place," said
Michael Maggen, head of paper conservation at the Israel Museum, who
will direct restoration of the document.
The codex itself "is not just another manuscript _ it's a landmark,"
largely because it lends insight into important aspects of Hebrew
grammar and pronunciation, he said.
Portions of the codex that have already been retrieved are on display in
the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The Sabbagh
fragment would eventually join its counterparts there, Glatzer said.
The codex, also known as the Masoretic Text, was written in Tiberias,
next to the Sea of Galilee, in the 10th century and later brought to
Jerusalem. It then traveled to Cairo, after which, according to
tradition, Moses Maimonides' grandson brought it to Syria. The elder
Maimonides was a 12th-century Jewish scholar whose writings and rulings
are still followed and studied.
"We have only about 60 percent of the codex _ more than a third is still
missing," said Aron Dotan, professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at
Tel Aviv University. The missing part includes most of the Torah, or
Pentateuch, he said. The codex comprised the books of the Old Testament.
Although only a tiny scrap, the find is still noteworthy, he said.
"Every find is something, every new piece is something," he said. "It is
an addition to what we have."
Glatzer hopes that the parchment's recovery will encourage others to
check their safety deposit boxes and attics for similar treasures.
"What (Sabbagh) did, others must have done," he said.