Aaron ben Asher

Life

Aaron ben Moses ben Asher was a Jewish scholar active in the first half of the tenth century in Tiberias, a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. In Arabic he was known as Abu Sa'id. Although he was not a Christian, he is frequently discussed in church history and biblical studies because he played a major role in shaping the text of the Old Testament as the church reads it today.

He was the last and most renowned member of the Ben Asher family. Beginning with Asher in the late eighth century, the family carried on Masoretic work in Tiberias for five or six generations. The Masorah (Hebrew for "tradition") refers to the work of adding vowel points and accent marks to the Hebrew Bible, which had been transmitted in consonants alone, and of supplying marginal notes to ensure accurate copying. His father, Moses ben Asher, is known as the scribe of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, which is recorded as having been produced in 895. The year of Aaron's birth is unknown; he is thought to have died around 960.

Work and Achievements

• The Aleppo Codex: Around 920 he is known to have corrected a biblical manuscript whose consonantal text had been written by the scribe Shlomo ben Buya'a, adding the vowel and accent marks and the Masoretic notes. The twelfth-century Jewish scholar Maimonides regarded this codex as the most reliable text and used it as his standard when writing a Torah scroll. The codex was later taken to Aleppo, Syria. A substantial portion of it was lost during the 1947 Aleppo riots, however, and the surviving portion was entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem in 1958.
• Completion of the Tiberian system: The Tiberian vocalization system that he refined remains in use today and became the foundation for the study of Hebrew grammar.
• Grammatical writings: He wrote the Sefer Dikdukei ha-Te'amim (Grammatical Analysis of the Accents), a compilation of the rules of accentuation and Masoretic information. For this reason he is regarded as a link between the Masoretes and later Hebrew grammarians.

During the same period, Ben Naphtali, also of Tiberias, produced a somewhat different textual tradition. In later generations, however, the Ben Asher tradition was generally accepted as the standard.

Influence on the Korean Church

Although he had no direct connection with the Korean church, his influence on it has been indirect yet far-reaching. The Leningrad Codex, copied in Cairo in 1008, is recorded as having been copied from Ben Asher's corrected text. This codex became the base text for the third edition of the scholarly Hebrew Bible Biblia Hebraica (1937) and for the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS, 1977). Korean translations of the Old Testament and Hebrew instruction in graduate schools of theology are known to rely primarily on these scholarly editions of the Masoretic Text. Korean Christian media and dictionaries of theological terms also mention his name when explaining the Masoretic Text and the Aleppo Codex.

Assessment

For more than a thousand years he has been respected within Judaism as the scholar who produced the most accurate Masoretic text. In Christian biblical scholarship as well, his work is regarded as the starting point for the study of the Old Testament text.

There is, however, debate over whether he was a Karaite. The Karaites were a branch of Judaism that rejected the Talmudic tradition and recognized Scripture alone as authoritative. The scholar Simhah Pinsker first raised this possibility in 1860. The evidence cited includes passages in which he treats the Prophets as having the same authority as the Law. By contrast, the early twentieth-century Jewish Encyclopedia considered this view difficult to accept. The scholar Aron Dotan argued that the "Ben Asher" refuted by Rabbi Saadia Gaon was a different person from Aaron. There is still no scholarly consensus on the question. Some have also doubted whether he personally vocalized the Aleppo Codex, but the prevailing view today is that the work is his.