When you’re reading through your Old Testament, you’ve probably noticed how the footnotes will commonly mention the “Masoretic Text”.
So, what on earth is the Masoretic Text?
Well, in the centuries following Christ, there were many Jews who still tried to maintain the Old Testament. These Jews would act as scribes, copying the entire Old Testament line by line.
Eventually though, a number of scribes decided that they didn’t like certain aspects of the process of copying the Old Testament. So, starting around the 5th century AD they began to try and fix certain flaws they saw in the copying process.
First of all, they added something called the Masorah. The word Masorah appears to come from two other Hebrew words. The first word, Masoret, means “a bond” or “chains”, while the second Hebrew word, Meser, means “a message”. When combined, we end up with the word Masorah, which could literally mean “a chained message”.
But, a better translation for Masorah would be “tradition”.
So, these scribes added the Masorah (tradition) in the 5th century. What does that mean? Basically, the Masorah was a whole bunch of notes made in the margins of the paper or in-between lines of text or at the end of a scroll or book.
What were these marginal notes? Mostly notes about things like pronunciation, spelling, and statistics (for example, how many times a certain word is used in the whole of the Old Testament).
Since these scribes added all these Masorah notes, they became known as the Masoretes (or Ba‘aley Hammasora, literally, “Masters of the tradition”). Then, the copies of the Old Testament that they created earned the name of the Masoretic Text, because it was made by the Masoretes.
But, the Masorah notes weren’t all that the Masoretes added. They also created section, chapter, and verse divisions for the Old Testament. Most of the chapter and verse divisions that they made are still what we use in our English Old Testaments (there are slight differences for certain verses though, especially in the Psalms).
Plus, the Masoretes added a system of vowels to the Old Testament. Now, this might sound strange to us. But Ancient Hebrew didn’t use vowels in its writing system. They just left vowels out and spelled everything with consonants.
As you could imagine, this created some confusion over the centuries. So, the Masoretes created a system where they could add vowel sounds to their copies of the Old Testament without messing anything up. To do this, they represented vowel sounds with little dots and lines that they could put underneath letters. This allowed them to show how something was supposed to be pronounced without having to really take up more space on the paper since they just could just fit small dots right under letters in a preexisting manuscript.
In addition to all this, the Masoretes were famous for their accuracy in making copies. They developed processes where they would count how many letters were supposed to be in each Book of the Old Testament. And they would count to see what the middle verse, middle word, and middle letter were supposed to be. This helped ensure that they could copy every single letter correctly every time.
Now, they still made mistakes on occasion, but their copies are considered very reliable and accurate. Even so, they didn’t start their work until the 5th century, so they were making copies of copies of copies…
Because of this combination of great accuracy with the fact that they were stuck with copies that might have already had small mistakes, the Masoretic Text is very useful for making translations of the Old Testament, while still not being a perfect source.
Throughout your Old Testament, you’ll see footnotes referencing how the Septuagint, Masoretic Text, and Dead Sea Scrolls might disagree with each other on minor issues of wording. It’s all very interesting to study, but we also need to always remember that all of our ancient manuscripts agree on almost every point. And no major point of teaching is ever really at stake when it comes to these issues of which translation is right.
I hope I didn’t make any of that too confusing. And I hope that you now better understand what the Masoretic Text is.