The Masoretic Text

The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today and that is the basis of all modern translations is called the Masoretic Text. It is so called because the Jewish scholars who devised the rules for copying scripture are known as the Masoretes. The term “masorete” comes from the Hebrew word masorah, which means “tradition.” The Masoretes were the scholars who devised ways to preserve the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. They were active between 500-1000 CE.

To understand what the Masoretes accomplished, remember that ancient written Hebrew was a language that used only consonants, not vowels. Any language written only in consonants is obviously open to serious problems of interpretation. Imagine writing English that way. There’s no way you could know, without context, whether the word “npt” was “incapable” or “input,” or whether “mnr” was “minor,” “manor,” “moaner,” or “manure.”

Over the centuries, the Masoretes have accomplished several gigantic tasks.

To begin with, they standardized the full consonant text of the entire Hebrew Bible so that there was an agreed text, with no variations. In addition, they devised a system of dots to be added to all consonants to indicate the correct vowels, so that anyone reading the text would know which of the range of possible words to accept as “correct.” And they worked to make sure no one would ever change the text again by implementing rules to follow when copying the text.

All this work had a great and long-lasting result. The Masoretes standardized the text. Furthermore, scholars today are fairly confident that when the Masoretes began their work, they were dealing with a consonantal text already well established, that there had been no changes for centuries, at least since the late 1800s made – at least significant changes. first century AD And so we can be largely certain that the Hebrew text we read today (if we read Hebrew!) is the same text as 1900 years ago.

But what about that?

The Dead Sea Scrolls There are many reasons why the Dead Sea Scrolls have proved so important to scholars of ancient Judaism. One of these reasons has to do with the text of the Hebrew Bible. As I mentioned, over 200 of the scrolls contain texts from the Hebrew Bible. The most famous is a complete copy of the book of Isaiah. However, most of the lyrics are fragmentary – some are just snippets. Yet their importance cannot be underestimated. Remember that the Masoretic text on which the printed Hebrew Bibles are based, found in the codex Leningradensis from 1000 CE. The texts of the Hebrew Bible among the Dead Sea Scrolls are at least a thousand years earlier than that. By comparing the form of the text in the Scrolls with the manuscripts from around AD 1000, we can see how well the text has been copied in all the intervening centuries.

In the end, there is very good news and less good news. The good news is this: in many cases, the Hebrew text found among the Scrolls is very, very similar to the consonantal text later standardized by the Masoretes. The copy of Isaiah is very similar to the copy in Codex Leningradensis.

The less good news is that this is not the case with all the books of the Hebrew Bible. For example, scholars had long noted that the Septuagint (Greek) text of the Book of Jeremiah was about 15% shorter than the Masoretic Text (i.e., it had so many fewer verses/words), and scholars suspected that this was because the Hebrew version of Jeremiah that known to the ancient Greek translators differed considerably from the Masoretic text. It turns out that one of the scrolls discovered at Qumran contains a Hebrew text of Jeremiah that is more similar to the one behind the Septuagint version than to the Masoretic text. 15% is a big difference. Other books of the Septuagint also differ markedly from the Masoretic text, for example in the books of Samuel and Kings. It is possible that the Hebrew texts of all of these books were in a state of flux before the text became standardized towards the end of the first century.

And what about the times before the Qumran scrolls were produced? How much was the text in motion in the early centuries when it was copied by hand again and again among scribes who did not have and thus could not follow the rules established later by the Masoretes? The reality is that we simply do not know how much the text has changed, in what places and for what reasons in the first centuries of copying.

In the end, there is very good news and less good news. The good news is this: in many cases, the Hebrew text found among the Scrolls is very, very similar to the consonantal text later standardized by the Masoretes. The copy of Isaiah is very similar to the copy in Codex Leningradensis.

The less good news is that this is not the case with all the books of the Hebrew Bible. For example, scholars had long noted that the Septuagint (Greek) text of the Book of Jeremiah was about 15% shorter than the Masoretic Text (i.e., it had so many fewer verses/words), and scholars suspected that this was because the Hebrew version of Jeremiah that known to the ancient Greek translators differed considerably from the Masoretic text. It turns out that one of the scrolls discovered at Qumran contains a Hebrew text of Jeremiah that is more similar to the one behind the Septuagint version than to the Masoretic text. 15% is a big difference. Other books of the Septuagint also differ markedly from the Masoretic text, for example in the books of Samuel and Kings. It is possible that the Hebrew texts of all of these books were in a state of flux before the text became standardized towards the end of the first century.

And what about the times before the Qumran scrolls were produced? How much was the text in motion in the early centuries when it was copied by hand again and again among scribes who did not have and thus could not follow the rules established later by the Masoretes? The reality is that we simply do not know how much the text has changed, in what places and for what reasons in the first centuries of copying.

And so the short story is this. For many, many centuries, the text of the Hebrew Bible has not changed in any significant way. But we cannot say how things changed between the time the books of the Bible were first produced and the time their texts became standardized towards the end of the first century AD.