Aaron ben Ascher

Aaron ben Mosche ben Ascher ( Hebrew אהרון בן משה בן אשר, called in Arabic Abu Sa'id , born. 10th century; died approx. 960) was a masoret and grammarian from Tiberias . He was the authoritative authority for determining the traditional Bible text in the first decades of the 10th century.

Life

Aaron ben Mosche was the last and most important representative of the Ben Ascher family, who worked as Masors in Tiberias for five or six generations. To this day it has not been conclusively clarified whether he belonged to the Karaites , who were integrated as a group within Judaism in the Middle Ages and were also accepted as such by Maimonides .

Masoret and grammarian

The Masoretic tradition of Ben Ascher is the one accepted in the Jewish Bible . However, this does not mean that the usual editions of the Bible version correspond exactly to the version by Ben Ascher. There are some differences between the printed editions and the various manuscripts believed to have come from the Ben Ascher tradition, mainly in the placement of word accents and some vowels (mainly Schwa and Chataf), which are of minor importance to the average reader . The fact that Ben Ascher used different vocalization systems in certain words at different times suggests that his method of vocalization has evolved over the years.

Ben Ascher was one of the first to lay the foundations of Hebrew grammar . His textbook Diqduqe ha-Teamim is referred to by David Kimchi in a Bible commentary as Machberet Ben Ascher ("Notes of Ben Ascher"). Grammatical principles did not constitute an independent subject at that time. Rather, the value of this work lies in the fact that the grammatical rules established by Ben Ascher explain the linguistic background of the vocalization. With a few exceptions, the book is written in a rhyming poetic style and is based in the language on Pijjutim , i.e. H. religious praises. It is believed that those parts that do not conform to this style are not from Ben Ascher. The language of the book shows some Arabic influence, especially with regard to grammatical expressions.

The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia adopts the vocalized spelling from the Masoretic text of the Leningrad Code , which is considered the oldest dated manuscript of the complete Hebrew Bible and which Paul Kahle identifies as a copy of the text by Aaron ben Moshe ben Ascher.

Works

• Diqduqe ha-Teamim (Masoretic textbook)
• The Dikduke of Ahron ben Moscheh ben Ascher by Paul Kahle

literature

• Encyclopedia Judaica , Volume 4, pp. 465-467
• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  AARON ben Mosche ben Ascher. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 1, Bautz, Hamm 1975. 2nd, unchanged edition Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-013-1 , Sp. 1.
• Aaron Ben-Asser. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 1, Leipzig 1732, column 23.