Masoretic Text
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[edit] Definition
The Masoretic Text is the official recension of the Hebrew Canon.
[edit] History
The massorah was the oral tradition of how to read the Hebrew Bible: as Hebrew was originally written without vowels, such a tradition was necessary to resolve points in the text which would otherwise be ambiguous. In the ninth century AD, the masoretic scholars decided to put this tradition on a firmer footing by making an authoritative recension of the Hebrew canon, using Masoretic Points to record the vowel sounds, adding an elaborate system of punctuation marks, and instituting a set of rules for copyists designed to eliminate copying errors.
These rules included methods of concentrating the copyist's mind on his job: no word was to be copied from memory, for example, but the words had to be read out loud and copied one at a time. Another rule said that if one mistake was found in a copy, the whole thing had to be scrapped: this must have focussed a copyist's mind wonderfully on his task.
The Masoretes also introduced systems of checking for errors very similar to the "checksums" used in information technology today to check that data has been correctly copied.
These ingenious methods had the result that the Masoretic Text has indeed been passed down almost without error since the recension was first made.
[edit] Discussion
Modern scholars may regret that the Masoretes did their work too late and too well.
It is plain that they were too late: the ninth century AD was much too late. It was, no doubt, a good idea to produce a recension of the Hebrew Canon, and an excellent idea to take care to keep it free of copyists' errors. But it would have been better still to do this when Hebrew was still a living language, and before the errors of millennia crept into the written text and the oral tradition.
That they did their work too well is more debateable, but the fact is that we do not have a complete copy of the Hebrew Canon which is not Masoretic. The Masoretic recension, with its vowels and punctuation, seems to have made every previous scripture obsolete, and no-one, it seems, thought to hang on to the old model for the benefit of scholars a thousand years hence.
This means that the decision of the Masoretic scholars is, more or less, final. Where the Masoretic version seems obscure or doubtful, we have no other Hebrew text to guide us --- just more copies of the Masoretic recension. The only clues remaining as to earlier texts and traditions come from the fragments of scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls and from early translations of the Hebrew canon into other languages, such as the Greek Septuagint.
For this reason, the Masoretic Text is --- like it or not --- the basis for all subsequent editions and translations of the Old Testament.
