Masoretic Text

Name and Meaning

The term "Masoretic Text" does not appear in the Bible. It is a scholarly term for the Hebrew text of the Old Testament as it has come down to us today. The word Masorah is generally understood to mean "tradition" in Hebrew. The medieval Jewish scribes and scholars who refined and transmitted this text are called the Masoretes.

Background and Formation

Hebrew was originally written with consonants only. The Masoretes were active roughly from the seventh to the tenth centuries in places such as Tiberias in Galilee and Babylonia. They did not alter the consonantal text, which had already gained authority; instead, they added vowel points, cantillation (accent) marks for public reading, and marginal notes. These notes recorded details such as word counts and unusual spellings in order to guard against copying errors. The Masoretes also distinguished between what was written (ketiv) and what was to be read (qere). A well-known example is the attachment of the vowels of "Adonai" ("Lord") to the four consonants of the divine name.

The tradition of the Ben Asher family of Tiberias became the standard. Its principal manuscripts are the tenth-century Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex from the early eleventh century (around 1008). The Leningrad Codex is regarded as the oldest surviving complete manuscript of the Hebrew Old Testament and serves today as the base text for scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible.

Relationship to Other Textual Traditions

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered beginning in 1947, include manuscripts roughly a thousand years older than the medieval Masoretic manuscripts. Many of them agree closely with the Masoretic Text, which is widely regarded as evidence that the text was transmitted accurately. However, texts close to the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) were also found, revealing that several forms of the text coexisted at the time. In the Book of Jeremiah, for example, the Septuagint version is considerably shorter and arranged differently.

Relationship to the New Testament

When New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they often follow the Septuagint. The phrase "a body hast thou prepared me" in Hebrews 10:5 follows the Septuagint and differs from Psalm 40:6, which, translating the Masoretic Text, reads "mine ears hast thou opened." Likewise, the word "virgin" in Matthew 1:22–23 corresponds to the term used in the Septuagint. By contrast, the Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14 can also be rendered "young woman," and the interpretation of this verse has long been debated.

Interpretations and Issues

• Protestantism: Since the Reformation, Protestants have emphasized the original Hebrew text. Chapter 1, section 8 of the Westminster Confession of Faith confesses that the Hebrew Old Testament has been kept pure by God's singular care and providence. In the seventeenth century, Reformed theologians debated whether the vowel points were also inspired. Today the prevailing view is that the vowel points were added later.
• Roman Catholicism: The Catholic Church long used the Vulgate, which Jerome translated from the Hebrew text. Its Old Testament canon, however, also includes the deuterocanonical books found in the Septuagint.
• Eastern Orthodoxy: The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint as its authoritative text of the Old Testament.
• Textual criticism (the discipline of comparing manuscripts to recover the original text) takes the Masoretic Text as its basis. At the same time, it sometimes adopts alternative readings of certain passages on the basis of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Septuagint, and scholars differ on how far such emendation should go.

In the Korean Church

Korean translations of the Old Testament generally use Hebrew Bibles based on the Masoretic Text as their source text. The Korean rendering "Yeohowa" is explained as deriving from the Western form "Jehovah," which combines the four consonants of the divine name with the vowels of Adonai. Critical editions based on the Masoretic Text are also used in seminary Hebrew courses and in Old Testament commentaries.