A copy of a Bible forgotten in a Jerusalem attic brought Rabbi Mordechai Breuer to the end of his quest. He had already figured out the precise wording of the Bible; he was only missing the open and closed portions, or text divisions. Maimonides recorded the division of the Pentateuch for posterity in his Mishneh Torah. But what of the other books of the Bible? Rabbi Breuer had to hypothesize by comparing different Bible manuscripts.

And then, in 1987, his student, Dr. Joseph Ofer (now a doctor of Bible studies at Bar-Ilan University), discovered that the house that had belonged to Shalom Shachne Yellin, in Jerusalem's Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, was to be demolished. Yellin, a Jewish scholar, had also been interested in the wording of the Bible. In the 1960s, Yellin sent an emissary to Syria with a copy of the Bible in which to record all the important notations (disputed portions, spellings, vowel marks and more) from the Aleppo Codex (Keter Aram Tzova), a 10th-century manuscript considered to be the oldest and most reliable copy of the Bible.

In the attic of the home, a few books on Bible vowel signs and cantillation marks were in fact uncovered, and Ofer rushed there to inspect them. To his disappointment, he did not find the important Bible copy. He asked if other items had already been given away, and learned that the owners had indeed given a few things to a small shop in Mea Shearim. Ofer hurried to the store, and there he found the Bible containing Breuer's holy grail: the solution to the unsolved puzzles. That Bible is now the centerpiece of an important exhibition about the Aleppo Codex in the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book.

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The hunt

Breuer, who died a month ago at 86, devoted his life to one impressive undertaking: determining the precise wording of the Bible. He had no academic education, but even academia was compelled to acknowledge his success; he even received the Israel Prize for his accomplishments. Breuer was born in Germany in 1921 to an illustrious Modern Orthodox family (his great-grandfather, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, founded the Torah and Derekh Eretz school of thought, which combined ultra-Orthodox religious meticulousness and general knowledge). He immigrated to Israel at age 13, where he attended several yeshivas and began studying Bible at Yeshivat Hadarom in Rehovot.

He began his project in 1958, when he was asked to proofread an edition of the Bible. He did this by using several commentaries. This effort won him recognition as an expert on the subject, although his son, linguist Dr. Yohanan Breuer, says his father was very dissatisfied with his work. Ten years later, he was asked to serve as an editor for Da'at Mikrah, a project to draft a modern Bible commentary faithful to the traditional assumptions. Breuer was assigned the task of determining the Bible's wording, spelling, vowels and cantillation. Breuer, who could be cruelly self-depreciating, told his son he didn't understand why they approached him: "Given the volume I produced, they should have disqualified me from any involvement with the subject."

For centuries, the Bible did not have any vowels or cantillation marks (Mesorah). These were added in the seventh to ninth centuries, mainly by scholars in Tiberias. For a long time, the Mesorah was transmitted orally from father to son, teacher to student. In the 10th century, a Mesorah expert named Aaron Ben-Asher, who is credited with writing the Aleppo Codex, recorded the marks.

Ostensibly, Breuer could have had a very useful tool in his search for a reliable version of the Mesorah, because large portions of the Aleppo Codex, from which Maimonides also gleaned the divisions that appear in his Mishneh Torah, arrived in Israel in 1958. The manuscript, preserved for many generations by the community in Aleppo, Syria, was damaged during the December 1947 pogroms there, following the UN resolution to establish Israel. Approximately two-thirds of its pages survived and were smuggled into Israel.

For Breuer, the problem was that the manuscript had been handed to the Hebrew University's Mifal Hamikra project, which did not agree to allow other researchers to share the asset. Due to lack of choice, Breuer embarked on a meticulous independent study: He took the five other most important Bible manuscripts (although newer than the Aleppo Codex) and began comparing them word for word, generally choosing what was written in the majority. Academia rejected this approach, his son says, "because the assumption was that the Mesorah did not have one agreed upon version, but that each of the important manuscripts reflected a different version." Breuer's work was perceived by academics as an "eclectic" combination. Breuer, however, thought there was one ancient version that could be revealed through the more recent copies.

And then he managed to get hold of facsimiles of the Aleppo Codex. The circumstances are unclear even to his son and his student, Ofer. The son knows only that "the day Dad came home with a copy of the Aleppo Codex, he was acting like an accomplice to a crime." There are several versions of his "accomplishment": some say the photocopies were given to him surreptitiously by someone with access to the Aleppo Codex; another, less likely, version says he simply approached the librarian of the Ben Zvi Institute, where the Aleppo Codex was being kept, and asked if they had another manuscript he had not seen, and the librarian innocently handed him photocopies of the Aleppo Codex. Meir Hovev, Breuer's friend, told Haaretz this week that Breuer said he received the copies from Shlomo Zalman Shragai, a Jewish Agency official who received the Aleppo Codex from the smuggler who brought it into Israel, and had kept some copies of its pages.

In any case, when Breuer reviewed the copies of the Aleppo Codex, he found his method was correct: Except for in two places, all the vowels and cantillation marks in the Aleppo Codex corresponded exactly with what he had reached through his independent, meticulous work. This information was not just a personal success but a research revolution: He proved there was one agreed upon version of the Mesorah, and that the Aleppo Codex reflected it. Otherwise, there would not have been a correlation between the majority of the other manuscripts and the Aleppo Codex, because the Aleppo Codex would have represented another Mesorah. Furthermore, this meant Breuer's work applied to the missing portions of the Aleppo Codex (most of the Pentateuch). Breuer then issued for Da'at Mikrah, and later independently, a version of the Bible that was quickly accepted as the most reliable and accurate.

The Behinot method

Breuer was responsible for another important innovation in Bible studies: He formulated his own explanation for Bible criticism's questions, primarily the different styles (sometimes within the same chapter), which prompted critics to conclude the Bible was written in different periods by different authors. At first, his son relates, "as is the way of Orthodox rabbis, Dad totally ignored Bible criticism, and was also convinced that all the questions it raised had been dismissed by earlier commentators. One day he decided nevertheless to read the texts on Bible criticism, and decided that before going to sleep, he would read one of the books. A short time after he started reading, he concluded that the criticism was accurate regarding different styles within the text. However, his belief in a God-given Torah did not allow him to accept that there were different 'authors' involved."

That is how the Behinot (analysis) method, as Breuer called it, was born - the assumption that the Bible contains different styles, but that they do not reflect different authors, but rather different forms of expression by the divine author in order to transmit different types of messages (for example, stringency versus compassion).

When he first lectured on the Behinot method, he did not disclose to his audience that his starting point was Bible criticism. When he revealed this, a furor erupted. His son says: "Dad said his method provides 'immunization' against the questions Bible criticism raises, but for a lot of people it was not easy to accept that he acknowledged the justness of these questions. At first, when he published an article explaining his method in detail, there was a big uproar."

Today, Breuer's method is accepted in many yeshivas and among many Bible students, especially those from the ranks of religious Zionism.