Our discussion of the organization and arrangement of Tanach would not be compete without at least a cursory introduction to the Masora. How was the text of Scripture kept uniform and free of corruption over the thousands of years of Jewish history? One needs to realize that in antiquity books were written by hand, sometimes from dictation of an assistant who read the scroll out before a scribe and other times copied directly from a master copy. It was a time consuming and tedious process and very susceptible to inadvertent misspellings, omission or substitutions of words and even phrases. Written scrolls were rare and very expensive; even the wealthy could not afford more than a few volumes. A manuscript at that time was like a car in our own. In addition, there was little opportunity to travel and to compare various scrolls and once an error became established in a particular scroll, it became perpetuated and ultimately preserved in copies written in that locality. After but a few generations, this mistake became enshrined in tradition and would be extremely difficult to correct. In fact, we now know that works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey that were composed in the same era as the Torah ultimately became profoundly corrupted (the texts we have now are a product of restorative work by the Greek academies of late antiquity). The same appears to be true of the various versions of the Torah preserved by deviant groups. Among the copies of the sectarians, another factor came into play. The temptation to add clarifications, insert a point of ideology or “correct” an obscure passage can be overwhelming when no one can check or contradict the scribe. We now possess manuscripts that appear to stem from these groups and that differ very significantly from the accepted Masoretic version of the Jewish tradition. The Samaritan version, for example, contains an extra eleventh commandment in its version of the ten commandments, has God ceasing His labor on the sixth rather than the seventh day, and joins the descriptions of the Exodus found in Devarim to that found in Shemot. The same is true of the Greek translations of the Bible that differ significantly from each other and the Masoretic text and of some, but not all, versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls[1].
The fact is that the existence of non-Masoretic versions is not a discovery of the 19th century but has been noted and commented on by the Rishonim. I quote the Ikkarim 3, 22: “Although there exist Torah versions among the nations that differ from our text or in some words, this difference occurred through transcribers who were not knowledgeable regarding this. The Jews take great care in the text of the Torah, in plene and abbreviated spellings, the knowing of the numbers of letters and word separations of the cantillations signs, so much so, that they write it in the margins of their books and call it “masoret”. Other nations do not do so[2]. So they said (Kidushin 30b) “Why were they called sofrim? Because they counted (sofru) all the letters in the Torah”. This signifies that it was preserved by them as Moshe had given it over, unchanged. Proof to this is that the text of the Torah found today in hand of all Israel dispersed all over the world… is the same text, without a difference”[3].
Quality control and prevention of scribal errors is what the Masora is all about.
The Masora, as we now know it, is a compilation of notes that served the purpose of alerting the scribe to the possibility of error. Whenever an unusual spelling, vocalization or turn of phrase were to be found, these notes list all similar construction elsewhere in the Bible. Thus, the transcriber would be kept from inadvertently substituting the more common word, spelling of phrase for the one required. As an example, let us consider the notes to the second verse in Genesis is “And the earth was empty and formless…”. The Masoretic note points out that the construction “And the earth…” is found 8 times in the Bible in the beginning of the verse. It then lists these eight instances. In this fashion a scribe is alerted to be careful not to miss the vav or “and” as he is writing this verse.
The Masorah also includes end tallys of the number of words, letters and sentences in each parsha to enable a quick check for discrepancies. In addition, one finds notations regarding the Keri and Ketiv, small and large letters, dots over certain words et cetera[4]. As time passed, an occasional exegetical or grammatical comment came to be inserted in the Masora notes[5]. At times they also indicate cantillation or pronounciation points. Although the first collections of these notes can only be traced to the early 600-700 C.E., it is quite clear that they existed in oral or written form much earlier[6]. One can therefore date the Masora to within few hundred years of the Men of the Great Assembly[7]. It is likely that a similar or other related mechanism to ensure fidelity to the original text existed prior to that. We know, for example, that in antiquity copies of sacred texts were kept in temples to guard accuracy of their text, as we find in the account of Josiah's restoration and attested to in Sofrim 6,6.
Lest you think that it is impossible for texts to survive unaltered over a long period of time, there exists ample precedent for preservation of accurate versions over centuries and even millennia. “”Extrabiblical examples include the Egyptian Hymn to the Uraeus (serpent goddess) first known under Ramesses II (thirteenth century) and then found again a thousand years later under the Ptolomies, and the festival text of the god Sokar transmitted with very little change through 800 years… We have, similarly, magical/ medical papyri of the New Kingdom (fourteenth-twelvth centuries) in which two spells are replicated some 900 years later in copies from about 330. And so on. Gaps are often due to chance, because we do not yet possess sufficient source materials.[8]
[1] The claim of some scholars that existence of such texts proves that no single authoritative text of the Bible ever existed needs not to be taken seriously. First of all, a substantial group of scholars do believe that an original Ubertext originally existed and that deviations from such a text were solely due to the high error rate of scribal transmission. Of course, our belief enshrined in Rambam’s 13 principles is that that text was identical to the one now in our possession. Secondly, even secular scholars currently accept the Masoretic text as the most accurate one in our possession. Finally, we can approach this queston by an analogy to the text of the Siddur. In our generations, one can find a Reform version, a Conservative edition and the prayerbook of the Reconstructionists that exist at the same time as the accepted traditional version. Can that serve as the proof that these versions always coexisted with the Orthodox prayerbooks? Clearly, the existence of the Mesora is in itself an indication how seriously correct transmission was viewed among the mainstream; correspondingly, an absence of a mechanism analogous to the Mesora among the sectarian groups invalidates manuscripts that stem from those quarters.
[2] Historically, a primitive versions of the Masorah has been employed by the Syriac Chrisitians for their text of the Bible, the Peshitta. This, however, was probably modeled on the example of the Jews and has not been adopted by any other group.
[3] Careful reading of this passage in the original suggests that the argument relates to the consonantal text which is overwhelmingly identical in all Masoretic texts and not to matters of vocalization and other particulars, which do differ. He refers to the former as “nusach” and others as “sh’ar devarim”. See also Mishne Torah, Laws of Sefer Torah, 8,4.
[4] For a brief review of how some Rishonim used Masora for exegesis see the introduction to the Ba’al Haturim, Feldheim edition, p. 16
[5] For one outstanding example example, see masorah to Shmuel I 12,2
[6] For some examples see Kiddushin 30a, Genesis Rabba 12,6; Sifre Numbers 69, Megilah 16b, Nedarim 37b and for others, Yeivin pp.132-137. It should be noted that there are some differences between the Babylonian Masora parenthetically quoted in Talmudic and Midrashic literature and the Tiberian Masora on which our scrolls are based. They have been collected by Shmuel Rosenfeld in Mishpachat Sofrim published in Vilna in 1883. This has been discussed in the Rishonim and a good overview, albeit from the academic perspective, is found in Y. Maori, Rabbinic Midrash as evidence for textual variation in the Hebrew Bible: History and practice, in: Modern Scholarship in the study of the Torah (Orthodox Forum), ed. S. Carmy Jason Aronson, Northvale NJ, 1996.
[7] For those interested in learning more about the Masora, there exist several good introductory texts in English. The clearest and most comprehensive is I. Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah (Masoretic Studies 5), Scholars Press, 1980
[8] K.A Kitchens, On the reliability of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. Mi, 2003, p. 202-203
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