The oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible extant is 1000 years old. Starting as early as 600 and certainly by 800 C.E., the Masoretes attempted to record and annotate the “authentic” version of the Hebrew Bible. Relgious groups today recognize their work from Tiberias as authentic. The word “Masoretes” comes from the Hebrew word “MESORAH” which refers to the transmission of a tradition. In a very broad sense the term “MESORAH” can refer to the entire chain of Jewish tradition (i.e. the Oral Law), but in reference to the masoretic text the word mesorah has a very specific meaning: the critial notes and vowel markings.

The Masoretes (sometimes called “Masorites”) apparently became dissatisfied with the traditional Hebrew text since it was written without vowels, or at least only with the three consonsants which can be treated as vowels (Yud, Hei, Vav). These three letters became known by their Latin name “matres lectiones”, which literally means “mother of meaning”. In other words, it was very difficult to read Hebrew without vowels until these three “helper” letters became used as vowels. They are also known in Hebrew as “Am Qiria” (mother of reading). The Yud and Vav are more often vowels than consonants.

The Masoretes began adding diacritic marks to provide information not found in the original Hebrew. For example, the letters SHIN and MEM-SOFIT can be read “SHEM” (meaning: name) or “SHAM” (meaning: there). Thus, a person reading the Biblical text would have to read “SHEM” or “SHAM” depending on the context. By adding vowel marks above, below, or in the middle of the consonants, the Masoretes made it obvious that the correct reading is either SHEM or SHAM. Basically, they added the “AH” sound (with a QAMATZ) or the “EH” sound a TZEREH. Later, some Latin-based language also added disacritical marks, such as the tilda, grave acccent, and umlaut.

The other difficult for beginning readers was that some letters like “SHIN” could be pronounced either as “S” or “SH”. So for instance, our word above could be “SHAM” or “SAM” (meaning: put) or “SHEM”. The Masoretes distinguished the two sounds by adding a dot to the upper-right or upper-left of this letter to distinguish between the “SIN” letter and the “SHIN” letter.

Reading from a Torah scroll can be somewhat difficult because most of the sentences join together without any punctuation. Sometimes white-spaces occur at the end of passages, but yet most sentences run together. The Masoretes added a few symbols, mainly the period, and also the MAQEF which joins related words such as the noun-construct pattern. The MAQEF basically acts like a hyphen between words.

Sometimes, the families disagreed about various issues, such as pronunication, and other authors even discussed their differences, and the writings of those authors are still available to study. The Masoretes weren’t the only systemizers and preservers of the scriptures, two lesser-known systems include the Babylonian system and “The Land of Israel” (“Palestinian”) system.

Today, one of the most famous bibles, produced according to the Massoretic tradition is “The Leningrad Codex”. When most people think of “The Hebrew Bible”, they are thinking of copies of this Bible. A codex, a Roman invention to replace scrolls, is similar to books we have today, basically pages joined with a cover (but obviously created long before the printing press). The Leningrade Codes is housed in the National Library of Russia, and dates to about 1009 C.E.. It is the oldest extant copy of the Hebrew Bible that includes the complete text. It is still in excellent condition after a thousand years, and contains amazing examples of medieival Jewish art.