A Torah Manuscript from Iran from the End of the Fifteenth Century with Haftarot and Psalms

Abstract This article analyzes a paper manuscript, containing the Pentateuch, Haftarot and Psalms. Only five medieval Persian Pentateuch manuscripts have survived, four from the fifteenth century and one from the sixteenth century. The selected manuscript is one of the four surviving manuscripts from the fifteenth century (1483–1484). It is the earliest surviving manuscript from Iran from the Middle Ages that includes the Pentateuch, the Haftarot, and the Psalms with vowel points, accents, Masorah magna and parva. A comparison of the manuscript with the Aleppo Codex and with five traditions from different regions (accurate Oriental Masoretic codices, Yemenite manuscripts, Sefardi manuscripts, Ashkenazi manuscripts, and Italian manuscripts) shows that this fifteenth-century manuscript written in Central Asia preserves and represents an ancient tradition with respect to the text, sections, and the Songs that is similar to the accurate Oriental Masoretic Pentateuchs. Our manuscript is witness to an ancient tradition that preserves a very accurate text in the Iranian region, and is close to the Aleppo Codex, and similar to Oriental manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries written in the East, without alternate traditions that corrupted the text.