Masoretic Text

Who the Masoretes Were

Hebrew was written with consonants only. A reader supplied the vowels from knowledge of the language and the tradition of how a passage was read aloud, which works well until the language stops being spoken daily. Between roughly AD 600 and 1000, scribal families — the best known being the ben Asher family of Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee — developed systems of small marks above and below the consonants to fix the pronunciation, and a second set of marks to fix the chanting and phrasing.

They also compiled the masorah, the notes that give the tradition its name: marginal annotations recording how many times a given word occurs, which spelling is used where, and where an unusual form is genuine rather than a slip. It is essentially a checksum system, designed so that a copyist's error would show up against the count. The consonants themselves the Masoretes did not touch; where they judged the written text wrong, they left it written and noted the reading in the margin instead.

Two Manuscripts Almost Everything Rests On

The Aleppo Codex, written around AD 930 and vocalised, on the testimony of a colophon added about a century later, by Aaron ben Asher himself, was regarded as the finest copy in existence; Maimonides appears to have used it. It was kept for centuries in the synagogue at Aleppo, and in riots there in 1947 a large part of it was lost, including almost all of the Torah. What survives is in Jerusalem.

The Leningrad Codex, copied in Fustat in Egypt about AD 1008 — several translations of its colophon say Cairo, and the article on the codex sets out why that is wrong — and now in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, is therefore the oldest complete Masoretic Bible. It is the base text of the standard scholarly edition, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which means it stands behind the Old Testament of nearly every English Bible on a modern shelf. A reader opening Genesis in almost any translation is reading, at one remove, a manuscript finished in Egypt in the eleventh century.

How Good Is It?

Very good, and it is worth saying exactly what that means. When the Dead Sea Scrolls appeared, the obvious test was to set the Masoretic consonants against Hebrew copies a thousand years older. A large proportion of the biblical scrolls are of a type essentially identical to the later Masoretic consonantal text — evidence that the Masoretes were preserving something already ancient and already stable, not inventing it.

The caution is that the scrolls also show other Hebrew text forms circulating at the same time, some agreeing with the Septuagint and some with the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Masoretic Text is the survivor of a family that already existed in the Second Temple period and became the standard; it is not the only Hebrew text there ever was, and modern translators consult the alternatives at points where the Masoretic reading is hard. Nor is it an autograph — it is a superb medieval edition of an ancient text, and describing it accurately is a stronger position than describing it as untouched.

Scripture references

• Deuteronomy 4:2 — "You shall not add to the word... neither shall you take away from it" — the conviction the masorah was built to serve
• Psalms 119:89 — "Your word is settled in heaven forever"
• Isaiah 40:8 — "The word of our God stands forever"

Sources

• Holding institutionNational Library of Russia, St Petersburg: the Leningrad Codex, Firkovich B 19 A — National Library of Russia · The holding library for the oldest complete Masoretic Bible, and the manuscript behind Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. No URL is given here because the library's own site was not reachable when this article was checkedSupports: Where the Leningrad Codex is held, and under what shelfmark
• Primary textThe Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex — The Westminster Leningrad Codex project · A freely available transcription of the Leningrad Codex itself, pointing, accents and allSupports: That the base text behind modern Old Testament translations can be inspected directly
• ScholarshipEmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible — Emanuel Tov · Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 4th edition 2022 — the standard handbook on the Masoretic tradition and its rivals. Print onlySupports: The relationship between the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint's Hebrew source and the Samaritan Pentateuch in section three
• ReferenceText & Canon Institute: articles on the Masoretic Text — Text & Canon Institute, Phoenix Seminary
• ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): The Samaritan Pentateuch — Society of Biblical LiteratureSupports: The other Hebrew text forms that circulated alongside the proto-Masoretic one

Further reading

• Text & Canon Institute: articles on the Masoretic Text
• Bible Odyssey (SBL): The Samaritan Pentateuch
• Wikipedia: Masoretic Text