A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East. By the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman's true-life detective story follows the trail of the precious manuscript - smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Isreal - to reveal how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing during the journey. It's a tale involving secret agents, pious clerrgymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book.