The Aleppo Codex Mystery Uncovered
In the summer of 2008, in a dark underground room at Israel’s national museum in Jerusalem, I encountered one of the most important books on earth. I had never heard of it. Up a winding flight of stairs from where I stood, in a hushed sanctuary dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls, a busload or two of tourists filed reverently past the glass cases containing the parchment celebrities of Qumran, but in the gallery below I was alone.
Off to one side, a bulky volume was open under a dim light. I was struck first by a certain air of dignity about it, a refusal to beg for attention: This book boasted no gold leaf, no elaborate binding, no intricate illuminations in lapis lazuli or scarlet, nothing at all but row after row of meticulous, handwritten Hebrew in dark brown ink on lighter brown parchment, twenty-eight lines to a column, three columns to a page. The margins contained tiny notes added by a different hand. It was open to the book of Isaiah. From the labels I learned that the volume was no less than the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, the singular and authoritative version, for believing Jews, of God’s word as it was sent into the world of men in their language. This lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler was the Aleppo Codex, and it would come to occupy much of my life for the next four years.
I was intrigued by the little I knew of the manuscript’s story and by the strange juxtaposition of its significance and its anonymity, and a few months after that first visit, amid my other journalistic tasks as a staff reporter at the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press — at the time, these tended to involve maintaining a stream of staccato wire copy from the Middle East describing incessant and fruitless political maneuvering and occasional carnage — I found time to make my first attempt to write about it. As I understood it then, the manuscript’s story was this: It was hidden for centuries in the great synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, where it became known as the Crown of Aleppo, or simply as the Crown. It was damaged in a fire set by Arab rioters in 1947, concealed, smuggled to the new state of Israel by the Jews of Aleppo as their community disappeared, and entrusted in 1958 to the country’s president, coming, in the words of one of the official versions of the story, “full circle.” This bound volume of parchment folios — a codex — had been kept intact for many hundreds of years, but a large number of leaves had mysteriously gone missing at the time of the synagogue fire. This hindered a quest by scholars to re-create the perfect text of the Bible, as the Crown had never been photographed and there were no known copies. A few vague theories existed about the fate of those pages, which I duly reported, along with a new attempt to find them by the codex’s custodians, scholars of the prestigious Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. I read some of the available material about the manuscript, interviewed several academics, and filed thirteen hundred words to an AP editor in New York City.
Read more: http://www.utne.com/literature/the-aleppo-codex-ze0z1207zsch.aspx#ixzz21TN58Jig
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Oh, and both of these, too:
Theoi Greek Mythology
Exploring Mythology in Classical Literature & Art
Interfaith Online
I'm gonna' let YOU explain to my wife why this remodel is taking so long to finish... 
before she cuts off your Internet usage! 
Ask her read it to you while you finish the remodel
The Millerite movement set the dates it did because of adherence to the Karaite method of calculating the Day of Atonement.
I said it was obscure, but it was one of those tidbits I couldn't help but share. Now I can die in peace.
EDIT: removed an irrelevant sentence from an irrelevant post...
by switching to the Karaite reckoning after a failed prediction earlier in the year. After the Great Disappointment he decided that the whole date-setting thing had probably been a mistake. In all fairness to the guy, his close associates share a lot of the responsibility for his time calculations being as specific as they were. Still, he signed off on it.
I think Ellen White probably comes closer to the Camping approach. She claimed that God placed his hand over an error in "Father Miller's" calculations...
Everyone seems to forget the whole "day and hour" proscription when it comes to their own calculations.
Edited for spelling...twice! 
