The History Of The Oldest Hebrew Bible

Although it fell, in retrospect, at the mid-point between the launch of the Kindle and the Kindle 2, I don't think I had more than a vague notion of what a Kindle was on the day in the summer of 2008 when I first descended into a dark room at Israel's national museum in Jerusalem and, standing in front of a dimly lit display case, encountered its exact opposite.

I spent much of the next four years writing the story of the object I found in the museum, a manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex -- a millennium-old bundle of animal skins that is the oldest and most accurate copy of the whole Hebrew Bible. In these years I was not cut off entirely from the march of technology. I acquired an iPod. I learned to send e-mail from my cellphone. But I never purchased a Kindle or any of its cousins, nor did I fully understand what they augured.