Open a Hebrew Bible and you will see the consonants, the main letters, surrounded by small dots and dashes above and below them. Those marks are the vowels and the accents. Around the edges of the page in a scholarly edition you will see tiny notes in abbreviated Aramaic. All of this was added by a group of scholars known as the Masoretes. Almost every Old Testament translation in the world, including Open Word Bible’s, is made from the text they guarded.

Who were the Masoretes?

The name comes from the Hebrew word masorah, meaning “tradition,” the tradition of how the sacred text is to be written and read. The Masoretes were Jewish scribes and scholars who worked from roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries CE, in two main centres: Babylonia (modern Iraq) and the land of Israel, especially the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.

The Tiberian school became the most influential. Its best-known families were the Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali families, who over several generations refined the system of vowels and accents. The last and most famous member of the Ben Asher family, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, worked in the first half of the tenth century. The Aleppo Codex, one of the most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, was pointed by him (see The Aleppo and Leningrad codices).

The Masoretes did not see themselves as editors. They did not change the consonantal text they had received. Their task was to protect it, and to fix in writing how it was to be pronounced and read.

The problem they solved: a text without vowels

Hebrew, like Aramaic and Arabic, was originally written with consonants only. A few letters could also hint at vowels, but most vowels were not written. For native speakers who knew the text by heart, this worked well. But by late antiquity Hebrew was no longer the everyday language of most Jews. Aramaic, Greek and later Arabic had taken its place. The correct reading of scripture was passed down orally, and there was a real danger that it would be forgotten or corrupted.

Some words can be read in more than one way when the vowels are missing. A famous example is in Genesis 47:31, where the same consonants can mean “bed” or “staff.” The Masoretic vowels read “bed”; the Greek Septuagint, translated centuries earlier, read “staff,” and that is the reading quoted in Hebrews 11:21. Both readings use exactly the same letters; only the vowels differ.

The Masoretes’ solution was to add vowel signs without touching the consonants. They invented a system of dots and short strokes placed above, below and inside the letters. Because these marks are small and sit around the letters, the sacred consonantal text remained untouched; anyone could still see exactly what the ancient scroll contained.

Accents: punctuation and music

The Masoretes also added a full system of accents (in Hebrew, te’amim). These do three things at once:

  • They show which syllable of each word is stressed.
  • They work as punctuation, dividing every verse into halves, quarters and smaller units. The strongest accent at the end of each verse marks the verse ending; another strong accent marks its middle.
  • They are musical notation for chanting the text in the synagogue.

Because the accents show how words group together, they are an ancient witness to how the text was understood. A well-known example is Isaiah 40:3. The accents connect “in the wilderness” with “prepare the way” (“A voice calls: in the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD”), while the Greek translation, quoted in the Gospels, connects it with the voice (“A voice of one calling in the wilderness”). Translators regularly consult the accents in decisions like this.

The Masorah: notes in the margins

The third part of the Masoretes’ work is the one that most directly protects the text: the Masorah, a vast body of notes.

  • The Masorah parva (“small Masorah”) is written in the side margins. It uses tiny abbreviations to say things like “this word occurs only here,” or “this spelling occurs three times,” or “this word is written without a vowel letter in this place.”
  • The Masorah magna (“large Masorah”) at the top and bottom of the page gives fuller lists, for example naming all the verses where an unusual form occurs.
  • The Masorah finalis at the end of each book gives totals: the number of verses, the middle verse, and the number of sections.

The purpose is to protect the text against the two most common kinds of copying error: unconsciously “correcting” an unusual word to a more common form, and losing or adding a letter. If a scribe is told in the margin that a word is spelled unusually here and in only two other places, they will not normalise it. If they know the book should have a certain number of verses, they can check their copy. Page Kelley, Daniel Mynatt and Timothy Crawford, in their guide to the Masorah of the standard scholarly edition, describe it as a system of quality control built into the manuscript itself.

Written one way, read another

One of the most interesting features the Masoretes recorded is called ketiv and qere: “what is written” and “what is read.” In some places, the received consonantal text had a form that the reading tradition did not pronounce. Instead of changing the letters, the Masoretes kept them, put the vowels of the word to be read onto the written consonants, and noted the word to be read in the margin.

The number of these notes varies between manuscripts and lists, from about 850 to more than 1,500 (Tov 2012). Some correct what look like spelling errors; some replace words thought too coarse to read aloud in public; some reflect differences in pronunciation.

The most frequent case is the divine name YHWH. It was not pronounced aloud; readers said Adonai, “Lord,” instead. So the Masoretes wrote the vowels of the substitute word with the consonants of the name. Christian readers in the late Middle Ages, not knowing this convention, read the combination as it stood and produced the hybrid “Jehovah.” The practice of printing “the LORD” in small capital letters in many English Bibles goes back to the same Jewish reading tradition.

The ketiv–qere system shows the Masoretes’ basic attitude very clearly. They would rather keep a form that seemed odd, and explain it in the margin, than change a single letter of the text they had received.

How faithful were they?

We can test the Masoretes against older evidence. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a thousand years older than the main Masoretic manuscripts, include many texts whose consonants are nearly identical to the Masoretic text. The vocalisation is harder to test, since the scrolls have no vowel signs, but comparison with ancient translations, with transcriptions of Hebrew words in Greek and Latin, and with the reading traditions of other Jewish communities shows that the Tiberian system preserved a genuinely ancient pronunciation, not an invention. Geoffrey Khan’s detailed study of the Tiberian reading tradition argues that it preserves a pronunciation with roots in the Second Temple period.

That does not mean the Masoretic text is free of every error. Its consonantal text sometimes preserves mistakes that entered before the Masoretes’ time, and in a few places other witnesses, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Greek Septuagint, seem to keep a better reading. Textual critics weigh those cases one by one. But the Masoretes themselves added virtually no new errors to the consonants. What they received, they passed on.

The Masoretes and Open Word Bible

Open Word Bible’s Old Testament is translated from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a digital transcription of the Leningrad Codex, a manuscript completed in 1008 CE in the Ben Asher tradition. Every Hebrew word you see in our reasoning records, with its vowels and accents, comes from that data. In a real sense, the Masoretes are the reason we can show you the Hebrew at all. Our rule that no one types Hebrew or Greek by hand is a small modern echo of their attitude: the text is copied from the source, never from memory.

Sources

  • Kelley, Page H., Daniel S. Mynatt, and Timothy G. Crawford. The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: Introduction and Annotated Glossary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
  • Khan, Geoffrey. The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew. 2 vols. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020. Open access.
  • Khan, Geoffrey. A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and Its Reading Tradition. 2nd ed. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2013.
  • Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.
  • Würthwein, Ernst, and Alexander Achilles Fischer. The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
  • Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by E. J. Revell. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1980.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.