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." The last volume of the printed version was published in 2019. 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 had a major argument with
Mordechai Breuer, where Cohen argues that we need to follow the Aleppo Codex exactly (except for obvious mistakes), as opposed to the position of Breuer that we should amend certain vocalizations to make the text more readable. 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. Cohen has not called for any changes in how traditional Torah scrolls are written, as this would likely result in a "firestorm of objection and criticism," but rather aimed for accuracy in versions used by Hebrew readers for studying. Cohen said: The people of Israel took upon themselves, at least in theory, one version of the Bible, down to its last letter... It was amazing to me that for 500 years, people didn't sense the errors. They just assumed that everything was fine, but in practice everything was not fine... I want the Bible to be user-friendly. Today, we can create sources of information and searches that allow you to get an answer to everything you are wondering... Cohen also stressed that unity and accuracy in the Hebrew Bible were important in order to distinguish the sacred Jewish text from those used by break-away sects, such as the
Christians and
Samaritans. In addition, Cohen launched a digital version, with the help of his son Shmuel, a computer programmer, which he hopes will become a benchmark of the Israeli education system. ==References==