Menachem Cohen (scholar)
| Menachem Cohen | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1928 (age 88–89) |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Occupation | Scholar |
| Employer | Bar-Ilan University |
| Known for | Correcting approximately 1500 Biblical errors relating to grammar and accentuation |
Menachem Cohen (born c. 1928) is an Israeli scholar who worked for over 30 years to correct grammatical errors in the Hebrew Bible. The last attempt at this was in 1525, by Jacob Ben-Hayim. Cohen's work demonstrates the extent to which Judaism venerates every tiny biblical calligraphic notation, to ensure that worldwide communities use exactly the same version of the Old Testament.
According to Jewish law, a Torah is invalid for public reading if even a single letter is incorrect or misplaced, for Jewish law considers each letter as indispensable.
In 1525, in Venice, Jacob Ben-Hayim, editor of the second edition of the Mikraot Gedolot, took it upon himself to fix grammatical errors in the Hebrew Bible. Ben-Hayim's version unified Judaism's varying texts and commentaries on the Bible under one umbrella, and it is this version that has remained the standard version used by generations to this day. However, Ben-Hayim had to rely on inferior manuscripts and commentaries, which caused numerous inaccuracies to appear in his version, and these were only magnified in subsequent editions.
In 2012, 84-year-old Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen of the Bible department at Bar-Ilan University finished a 30-year mission to fix all known textual errors in the Hebrew Bible to produce a "truly definitive edition of the Old Testament."
Cohen's edits focused mainly on grammatical errors, such as fixing the accent of a vowel, the letter in a word, or fixing biblical symbols used for accentuation and cantillation (te'amim) which were copied down incorrectly centuries ago. Cohen used thousands of medieval manuscripts to identify approximately 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew Bible, which he corrected in a 21-volume set. The errors that Cohen found do not alter the meaning of the Bible or have any bearing on its stories. Most errors were not found in the Torah (or Five Books of Moses), which does not include vowel markings or cantillation notations, but rather in the final two-thirds of the Tanakh. Cohen also included the most comprehensive commentaries available, most notably that of Rashi.
Cohen primarily relied on the Aleppo Codex, a thousand-year-old text considered to be the most accurate copy of the Bible. In 1947, a Syrian mob burned the synagogue that was protecting the Codex, and the Codex briefly disappeared before most of it was smuggled out into Israel a decade later.
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