The Masoretic Text Witness

The Masoretic Text

A source-witness: the received Hebrew Bible

The Masoretic Text is the traditional Hebrew text of the Jewish Scriptures, fixed and transmitted with great care by the scholars called the Masoretes between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. To the ancient consonantal text they added vowel signs, accents, and a body of marginal notes — the Masorah — to guard the reading and spelling against error. The chief complete manuscripts are the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, the latter the oldest complete copy and the basis of most printed Hebrew Bibles.

Value as a witness

The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew witness, transmitted with extraordinary fidelity over many centuries. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a thousand years older, have shown that its consonantal text was already substantially fixed in antiquity. Yet it is one witness among several: where it differs from the Scrolls, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan text, each reading must be weighed, for in some places the older versions preserve a better or an earlier form.