Vince Beiler on the Firkovich Collections

Vince Beiler has put his Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation online for download. I got to know Vince recently in Cambridge, and he has been very generous with his time and sharing his expertise and resources on the Firkovich collections in St. Petersburg. These collections are fascinating and rich, yet hardly touched by modern scholars. There are sections of many different codices there, often as old and important as the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, but almost entirely unstudied. Because the library class marks for these manuscript sections are all mixed up, Vince has had to do a lot of careful work reconstructing the original manuscripts from the various class marks, which is an invaluable service to the field. For more details on the manuscripts and their relationships based on the Masorah, check it out:

The Small Masorah: Genealogical Relationships in 112 Early Hebrew Bible Codices Based upon the Masorah Parva 

Abstract 

This thesis, written by Vincent D. Beiler and entitled The Small Masorah: Genealogical Relationships in 112 Early Hebrew Bible Codices Based upon the Masorah Parva, examines the Tiberian Masorah parva in 10th–12th-century Hebrew Bible manuscripts. In order to integrate the vast amount of data available, select subsections of the Masorah of these 112 manuscripts were collated, amounting to ca. 43,000 Masorah parva notes. The database that arose from this collation was then mined for similarities and differences between the manuscripts, with the goal of providing a stemma of early Hebrew Bible manuscripts. 

In the main, the Masorah parva data indicate that there is a central cluster of manuscripts that are highly uniform, and then a larger number of manuscripts that diverge in various ways, both large and small, from the centre nucleus. These data confirm the centrality of the Aleppo Codex and highlight the value of a number of additional codices that have heretofore been largely overlooked. It is also shown that many of the codices that scholars traditionally have relied upon are perhaps not the optimal MSS with which to begin research of the Tiberian Masorah. 

Additional subgroupings of manuscripts are also noted, particularly (a.) for a cluster of N. African manuscripts, (b.) for a cluster of codices that resemble the Cairo Codex, and (c.) for the manuscripts of Samuel b. Jacob. 

It is also demonstrated that the collection of Bible MSS in St. Petersburg, previously known to many as a scattered collection of leaves, is perhaps more substantial than has been realised. This is because many of the classmarks can be matched with other classmarks of the Firkovich collections, resulting in Bible manuscripts of much more substantial length. These classmark matches number nearly 400 and are set forth here for the first time.