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Copyright

Vincent Beiler;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 111–146

Language

  • English

Print Length

36 pages

Does the Cairo Codex Represent a Scribal School?

  • Vincent D. Beiler (author)
Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic(pp. 111–146)
The study investigates the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, questioning its date, origins, and potential affiliation with a specific scribal school. While carbon-14 dating suggests an eleventh-century origin, some scholars argue for an earlier ninth-century date based on colophon analysis. The codex’s features, such as its “thick script,” spacing practices, and use of marginal markers, are compared with features of other Oriental manuscripts, revealing unique characteristics shared with a subset of codices. These observations support the hypothesis that the Cairo Codex belongs to a scribal tradition distinguishable from the Aleppo Codex.

Contributors

Vincent D. Beiler

(author)
Postdoctoral Research Associate and Research Fellow at University of Cambridge

Vincent D. Beiler (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow with the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research who specialises in medieval manuscript studies and the Cairo Geniza. Along with important peer-reviewed articles and chapters, he co-edited (with Aaron D. Rubin) a Festschrift in honour of Gary A. Rendsburg entitled Linguistic and Philological Studies of the Hebrew Bible and its Manuscripts (Brill, 2023).