The Masoretic Text

Deuteronomy 31 is one of the places where the Old Testament talks about itself as a written thing. Moses finishes writing the words of this law in a book, and in the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the Hebrew text you have been using all through this track, the phrase is עַל־סֵפֶר (al-sefer, on a book or in a book). The noun סֵפֶר (sefer) means a written document of any length, a letter, a deed or a scroll. Then comes the command to the Levites: לָקֹחַ (laqoach, take). Your parsing tools will tell you this is not an imperative. It is a Qal infinitive absolute of the root לקח (l-q-ch, to take), which Hebrew can use as a strong command, a usage the module on the verb system introduced. The book is to be put beside the ark of the covenant as a witness.

Notice what the passage holds together. The words are written, so they can be kept. They are kept by named people in a named place, so they can be checked. And they are read aloud to the whole people every seven years (31:10-13), so the written words become the heard words of a congregation. Every stage of the Hebrew text's long history after Moses repeats that pattern: writing, guarding, and reading aloud. The Masoretes, the subject of this lesson, were the people who guarded all three for the final centuries before printing, and the most interesting thing they did was to keep the written text and the read text side by side when the two did not quite match.

This lesson is not the general introduction to manuscripts. The Hermeneutics lesson Which Bible Are You Reading, in the module The Toolbox, introduced the three great witnesses to the Old Testament, the Masoretic Text, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and the Koine Greek lesson Manuscripts and Variants taught how the New Testament's copies are sorted and weighed. Here we go inside the Hebrew tradition itself: who did the work, which manuscripts carry it, and what the marks in the margins of your Hebrew Bible mean.

The Masoretes were Jewish scribes and scholars who worked from roughly the sixth or seventh century to the tenth century AD, most famously at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, with other schools in Babylonia and elsewhere in the land of Israel. Their name comes from masorah, the tradition, the handed-down knowledge about how the text is written and read; the exact origin of the word is debated, but the meaning in use is not. They did not create the consonantal text. The consonants had been handed down for centuries before them, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the subject of the next lesson, show copies very close to the Masoretic consonants already in existence before the time of Jesus. What the Masoretes did was fix the reading of those consonants and surround them with a protective fence of notes.

They added three things. First, the vowel points, the dots and dashes above and below the letters that you learned in the first module. The Tiberian system, which your Hebrew Bible uses, recorded in writing the pronunciation that had been passed on by mouth in the synagogue. Second, the accents, the small marks that show where each word is stressed and how the words group into phrases, which also served as musical notation for chanting the text aloud. Third, the Masorah proper: notes in the margins recording how often a word or spelling occurs, warning a copyist where an unusual form is correct and must not be smoothed out, and counting verses, words and letters. The short notes in the side margins are called the Masorah parva, the small Masorah; the longer lists at the top and bottom of the page are the Masorah magna, the large Masorah.

The counting can look obsessive, but it was a copying tool. If you know how many verses a book should have and which letter falls in the middle, you can check a new copy against the old one without reading every word against every word. The Babylonian Talmud (Kiddushin 30a) records that the earlier scribes were called soferim, counters, because they counted the letters of the Torah, and that the vav in the word גָּחוֹן (gachon, belly) in Leviticus 11:42 marks the middle letter of the Torah. Printed Hebrew Bibles still write that vav larger than the letters around it. The habit of counting is older than the Masoretes; they inherited it and extended it.

Two families of Tiberian Masoretes are named in the sources, the ben Asher family and the ben Naftali family, and their differences are tiny: mostly a vowel point or an accent here and there. The ben Asher tradition won out, and its last and most famous member, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, who worked in the first half of the tenth century, stands behind both of the manuscripts in the next section. When a Hebrew Bible calls itself Masoretic, it means the ben Asher form of the Tiberian tradition.

The accents deserve a word of their own, because they are interpretation as well as music. Each accent either joins a word to the next or separates it, and so the accents work like punctuation. Isaiah 40:3 shows what is at stake. In the WLC the line begins קוֹל קוֹרֵא בַּמִּדְבָּר פַּנּוּ (qol qore bammidbar pannu, a voice calling, in the wilderness prepare). The accent on קוֹרֵא (qore, calling) is a dividing accent, so the Masoretes read: a voice is calling, and what it calls is, in the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD. The parallel line supports them, since it continues, make a straight highway in the desert. The BSB follows the accents, putting a colon after 'A voice of one calling' and continuing, 'Prepare the way for the LORD in the wilderness.' But the Gospels, following the Septuagint, which had no accents, read the words the other way: 'A voice of one calling in the wilderness' (Matthew 3:3). The consonants are the same; the phrasing differs. Neither reading is careless. The Masoretic accents record an ancient synagogue understanding of the verse, and the Gospel writers saw in John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness, a fulfilment the other phrasing brings out. When you read your Hebrew, remember that the accents are the Masoretes' reading, very old and usually right, but not part of the consonantal text.

A codex is a book with pages, as opposed to a scroll. Two Masoretic codices matter more than any others, and their facts are worth having exactly, because they are often garbled.

The Aleppo Codex was written in Tiberias early in the tenth century, around 920 to 930 AD by the usual estimates. The consonants were written by a scribe named Shlomo ben Buya'a, and the vowels, accents and Masorah are attributed to Aaron ben Asher himself, by a note added to the manuscript after his death; whether he did the pointing with his own hand is debated. The codex was later owned by the Karaite Jewish community in Jerusalem. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 they held it for ransom, and it was redeemed and taken to Egypt. In Old Cairo it was consulted by Moses Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, who described it as the text all relied on and used it as his model for how a Torah scroll should be laid out. By tradition it reached Aleppo in Syria in the late fourteenth century, around 1375, and was kept there in the main synagogue for nearly six hundred years.

In December 1947, in riots in Aleppo that followed the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine, the synagogue was set on fire. The codex survived, but when it was smuggled out of Syria and reached Jerusalem in January 1958, no more than 294 of its estimated 487 leaves remained. Almost all of the Torah is gone: the surviving text begins with the last word of Deuteronomy 28:17. So the anchor passage of this lesson, Deuteronomy 31, is among the Torah pages that survive. Also lost are the end of the Writings, from Song of Songs 3:11 onward, including Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah. The codex is now kept by the Ben-Zvi Institute and housed at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Because of its authority it is the base of the Hebrew University Bible Project and of several modern Jewish editions, including the free text Sefaria calls Miqra according to the Masorah.

The Leningrad Codex is younger but complete. Its colophon, the scribe's closing note, dates it to 1008 AD (a reading of 1009 is also possible), and says it was written in Cairo by a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob, copied from manuscripts corrected by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. Unusually, Samuel wrote everything himself: consonants, vowels, accents and Masorah. It is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that we have. It came into the collection of Abraham Firkovich, a nineteenth-century Karaite collector, and is now in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, catalogued as Firkovich B 19 A. The city was called Leningrad when the codex got its usual name.

Almost every scholarly Hebrew Bible printed in the last century is a transcription of the Leningrad Codex: the third edition of Biblia Hebraica (1937), Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS, 1977), and the Biblia Hebraica Quinta now being published in parts. The Westminster Leningrad Codex is a free digital transcription of it, produced at Westminster Theological Seminary and released into the public domain, and it is the Hebrew text behind the interlinear on Blue Letter Bible; STEP Bible's Hebrew is also a transcription of the Leningrad Codex. When you tap a Hebrew word on your phone, you are reading, at one remove, the hand of Samuel ben Jacob in Cairo a thousand years ago.

Two cautions. First, do not say the Masoretic Text was invented in the tenth century. The codices are tenth- and eleventh-century copies of a text whose consonants are, by the evidence of the scrolls, more than a thousand years older. Second, do not say the Masoretic Text is the original text. It is one form of the text, preserved with extraordinary care, and the next two lessons will show places where other witnesses may preserve something older. Both statements are true together, and the honest teacher says both.

Here is the most visible sign of the Masoretes' reverence. When they believed the consonants handed down to them should be read differently from how they were written, they did not change the consonants. The written text was too holy to alter. Instead they wrote the consonants as they found them, put the vowels of the word to be read under those consonants, and wrote the consonants of the word to be read in the margin. The written form is called the ketiv, from an Aramaic word meaning what is written; the form to be read is the qere, what is read. In a printed Hebrew Bible the margin will have a small note, often marked with a qof, the first letter of qere.

Psalm 100:3 is the classic case, and you worked it in the inquiry. The ketiv is וְלֹא (velo, and not), so the line reads, it is he who made us, and not we ourselves. That is the KJV's 'and not we ourselves'. The qere is וְלוֹ (velo, and to him, that is, and we are his). The two words are pronounced the same and differ by one letter, alef against vav. The BSB follows the qere: 'It is He who made us, and we are His.' Most modern translations do the same, because the qere fits the parallel line that follows, we are His people. But the KJV's reading is not an error of the KJV. It translates the letters on the page.

Sometimes the qere supplies a word the scribes believed had fallen out. In Ruth 3:5 Ruth answers Naomi, all that you say I will do, and the Masoretes direct the reader to add אֵלַי (elay, to me), all that you say to me, though the word is not written in the line. Sometimes the qere removes a written word that should not be read. And one qere applies everywhere, without a marginal note, because every reader knew it: the divine name יהוה (YHWH) is never pronounced, and the reader says Adonai, Lord, in its place. That is why the BSB prints LORD in small capitals, as the lesson on the vowel points explained. Sefaria, as you saw, prints the ketiv in round brackets and the qere in square brackets, which makes these places easy to find on a phone.

There are many hundreds of ketiv and qere notes in the Hebrew Bible; counts run from under a thousand to around fifteen hundred, because manuscripts and editions differ in what they mark and how they count. Most are matters of spelling or grammar that make no difference to an English reader. A few, like Psalm 100:3, change the sense. What they tell you about the Masoretes is more important than any one of them: these scribes kept, on the same page, the text they had received and the text they believed should be read, and left the evidence for later readers to weigh. That is the opposite of a tradition that tidied its text to suit itself.

Two other marks are worth knowing because you will see them on Sefaria and in printed Bibles. At the ends of many paragraphs you will find a פ (pe) or a ס (samekh), the Masoretic paragraph markers. The pe marks an open paragraph, after which the next section starts on a new line; the samekh marks a closed one, after which a space is left within the line. These divisions are much older than our chapters and verses, which were added in the Middle Ages, and they sometimes divide a passage more sensibly than the chapter breaks do. When you choose where your capstone passage begins and ends, look at them.

Three claims about the Masoretic Text are common in sermons, and each needs care. The first is that not a letter of the Hebrew Bible has changed in three thousand years. That is not true, and the ketiv and qere notes are the Masoretes' own admission that it is not true, as are the differences among the Hebrew manuscripts and the scrolls. What is true is remarkable enough: the Masoretic tradition copied its text with a care that left the consonants of the codices very close to the proto-Masoretic scrolls a thousand years older. You do not need to exaggerate a fact that strong.

The second claim is that the vowel points are as inspired as the consonants. This was a live debate among Protestant scholars after the Reformation. The Swiss Formula Consensus of 1675 affirmed the inspiration of the vowel points, against the French scholar Louis Cappel, who argued in his Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) that the points were added long after the biblical writers. Cappel's historical point is now accepted by scholars of every tradition: the written pointing system is medieval. What the debate was really about still matters, though. Those who defended the points were defending the trustworthiness of the reading tradition, and that defence has something to it, because the points recorded a pronunciation passed down orally, not invented by the Masoretes. Where the vowels can be shown to be wrong, a translator may repoint the consonants, and many translations occasionally do; but they do it carefully, because the vowels usually carry very old knowledge.

The third claim, from the other direction, is that the Masoretic Text is a late Jewish text that should give way to the Greek. The Septuagint lesson in this module will give that view its strength, since it was the Old Testament of most of the early church. But as a general claim it outruns the evidence. The scrolls show that the Masoretic consonants are ancient, and in most places where the Masoretic Text and another witness differ, the Masoretic reading is at least as likely to be original. The fair position, and the one most modern translations take in practice, is that the Masoretic Text is the base, read with gratitude, and that other witnesses are consulted where it seems to have suffered. Where translators depart from it, a good translation says so in a footnote, and you will learn to read those footnotes in the next two lessons.

What should a preacher do with all this? Hold the text with confidence and with honesty. Confidence, because the Hebrew text in your hand was guarded by scribes who counted its letters and refused to alter even what they believed was a slip of the pen. Honesty, because those same scribes told you where they had doubts, and a preacher who builds a sermon point on a word should first check whether it is one of those places.

This module's exercises build toward the capstone at the end of the track, a full study of one Old Testament passage of your own choice. If you have not chosen your passage yet, choose it now: a narrative scene, a psalm, or a prophetic oracle of roughly eight to fifteen verses that you expect to preach or teach. Write the reference at the top of a fresh page in your notebook and head the page Hebrew Text.

First, on your phone, open your passage on Sefaria, which is free, and switch the display to Hebrew or to Hebrew and English side by side. Go through it verse by verse looking for round and square brackets. For every ketiv and qere you find, copy both Hebrew words carefully, with their vowels if you can, and write the verse number beside them.

Second, for each one, look the verse up in the BSB and the KJV on Blue Letter Bible and write down which reading each translation follows. If the English is the same either way, write that down. If it differs, write one sentence on what difference it makes to the meaning.

Third, look at the paragraph markers. Note where Sefaria shows a pe or a samekh near the beginning and end of your passage, and ask whether the Masoretic paragraphs begin and end where your chosen verses do. If they do not, write down whether you will move your boundaries, and why.

Finally, write one sentence you could say to your congregation about the Hebrew text of your passage, true and not exaggerated. If your passage has no ketiv or qere at all, the sentence might simply be that the Hebrew text here is not in question. That is a real finding, and you now know it first-hand.