(BA) Masoretic Text

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This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer.

In both traditional Judaism and academia, the de facto standard text of the Hebrew Bible is the Masoretic Text.

The Masoretic Text is a family of manuscripts, the oldest surviving ones being about a thousand years old, that almost all agree letter for letter, and contain various traditional additions, like vowel symbols, verse divisions, and so on. Although the Masoretic Text manuscripts are older than the invention of printing, their production is so standardized that you can think of them as a single "edition" of the Hebrew Bible, an edition which happens to be the only surviving complete edition, in Hebrew, of the Hebrew Bible.

However, the Masoretic Text is not the original text of the Hebrew Bible. The original versions of the books are lost forever, and the Masoretic Text is simply one of several tools that can be used in trying to reconstruct it. Other important sources include the Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch.

When somebody says that the "original Hebrew" reads X or Y or Z, usually they are simply quoting the Masoretic Text. Even this website could feed into that illusion. When I reference, "the Hebrew", this will unless otherwise indicated be the Masoretic Text. But you should try not to get the two mixed up. The originals are gone. Various imperfect sources are all that remain.

In scholarly circles in the United States, the standard Masoretic Text used is that of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which copies exactly the text preserved in the Leningrad Codex. There is, however, an alternative approach, associated with Mordechai Breuer, which attempts -- I think successfully -- to reconstruct the text of the Aleppo Codex. A text produced along the Breuer lines can be found at Wikisource under the title Miqra according to the Masorah.