“The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuitof an Ancient Bible” by Matti Friedman (Algonquin, $24.95)

“The Aleppo Codex” is a detective-style story about the most important religious text that you’ve probably never heard of. Even the author hadn’t known about the codex when he ran into the story in 2008 while an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem.

The tale includes elements of Jewish scholarship from a thousand years ago, Middle East politics from the middle of the 20th century, and the mendacity of all manner of people in a way that is, sadly, timeless.

The telling also includes a lot of author Matti Friedman. Once upon a time, a book like this would have woven facts and narrative with nary a first-person pronoun that wasn’t part of a quote. These days, accounts such as this apparently require a healthy dose of memoir. So Friedman carries us on his shoulder into dead ends, along rabbit trails and to successful discoveries of interesting clues.

We get it: This wasn’t an easy story to dig out. And we understand that the ending might not be as neat and satisfactory as we’d like because fact is seldom as clear-cut as fiction.

The saga is compelling. The Aleppo Codex is (or maybe was) the oldest surviving manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible. Created in Tiberias by scholars and scribes around A.D. 930, the codex occupies a place that only makes sense if you know how Jewish sacred texts are written down.

The first five books of the Bible, the Torah, are inscribed on parchment scrolls according to an incredibly specific tradition. Some letters and words are made larger, others smaller. The name of God is never spelled out. It is written without vowels or punctuation.

Imagine an English Bible where the first line reads “n th bgnnng dn crtd th hvns nd th rth.” Is that first word “on,” “in,” or maybe “one?” What the heck is the fourth word? And is the seventh word maybe “havens?” A mostly oral tradition kept the meaning straight, but for Jews in the increasingly dispersed Diaspora, a common understanding had become vital.

As Friedman explains: “The Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one, because minor differences in the text could lead to diverging interpretations and a splintering of the faith. And yet much of the information crucial to reading the book properly could not be found in the book itself.” Hence the creation of various written codexes, complete with vowels and commentaries, of which this one was considered the most authoritative. Over the centuries, it traveled through the Middle East, ending up in the Syrian city of Aleppo. And over the years, its role changed from a prized tool of scholarship to more like an icon — preserved by its guardians and seldom seen by outsiders.

In 1947, on the day that the United Nations recognized the new nation of Israel, the Arab residents of Aleppo rioted and trashed the synagogue where the codex had been kept. The story was told afterward of how the pages of the codex were torched along with many other texts stored there.

And then, some of the book turned up in Israel, carried by a cheese merchant from Aleppo. How was it saved? How much was lost? How much of the story is connected with money — the tens of thousands of dollars that unscrupulous collectors would be willing to pay for pages from such a famous manuscript?

That is the mystery that Friedman tries to unravel, with the help (and sometimes hindrance) of modern scholars, government officials, a former member of the Israeli secret police and collectors of rare religious manuscripts. His best guess, by the end, finds a couple of heroes who saved what they could, balanced against an unknown number of thieves who have, so far, gotten away with a monumental felony against history.

Occasionally, the writing gets a bit Da Vinci Code, ginning up a sense of danger for Friedman that may not be justified. But in the main, he moves along briskly, skillfully weaving the strands of religious and secular history along with his account of his own skulking and prodding of sources.

Here’s how Friedman sums up the story: “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it. It fell victim to the instincts it was created to temper and was devoured by the creatures it was meant to save.”