Masoretic Text
The Torah texts that we read today are believed by some to be the same as those
given to Moses and the
people of Israel by God.
It is believed by scholars that the word of God and history of the Jewish
people was imprinted on the minds of the Israelites at Mount Sinai.
Over the years as tradition was orally passed on and eventually written
down, many disparities of the Torah emerged as countless scribes wrote
numerous scrolls.
After being exiled from Israel,
and as the Jewish Diaspora grew more widespread
across the World, many Jews understood the
importance of creating a single text of
the Torah. This uniformity would enable
the consistency of the Jewish faith outside
the land of Israel. Specific scholars and
scribes were chosen for this task, these
men were called Masoretes. Masoretes derives
its name from the word “masorah”
meaning “tradition;” their ultimate
goal was to uphold the traditions of the
Jewish people. The Masoretes had to
decipher the authentic word of God and eliminate
the dissimilarities.
The Masoretes attempted to attain consistency
through established rules of articulating the words and correcting spelling
and reading. The Torah scroll was written, using only the consonants
and no vowels or accents. Therefore, the Masoretes created a
system of chanting symbols and vowel placement, so future generations
would understand the proper pronunciation. The Masoretes made
all spelling changes or changes to the text in the margins, because
they refused to alter the original text. Finally, the Masoretes provided white spaces in between words to breakup the continuous text.
There were two schools of thought overt the rewriting
of the Bible. There was the Eastern or Babylonian school and the other
was a Western or Palestinian school. The Palestinian school had two
branches of thought, the Ben
Asher and the Ben Naphtali in Tiberias. In 930 C.E. Aaron
ben Moses ben Asher produced the first complete Bible, called the Aleppo Codex,
utilizing masoretic symbols and ordering. For several centuries, various
Masoretes continued to influence the pronunciation and writing of the
text. However, the first “official” Bible text that is still
used today was the Great Rabbinic Bible, published in 1524-1525 by Daniel
Bomberg (a Christian in Venice).
Sources: Eisenberg,
Ronald L. The
JPS Guide to Jewish Traditions.
PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2004.
Kolatch,
Alfred J. The
Jewish Book of Why/The Second Jewish
Book of Why. NY: Jonathan
David Publishers, 1989.
Wigoder, Geoffrey
, Ed. The
New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia.
NY: Facts on File, 1992. |