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Tanakh - Hebrew Masoretic Text

The earliest text of at least the oldest Old Testament Scriptures was in the Canaanitc Script (called Ra'atz, or Libona'ah by the Rabbis), of which six lines dating apparently from Hczckiah's reign (ca. 700 BC), discovered (1880) in a tunnel of the Siloam pool, resemble that of the Moabite Stone, though slightly more cursive. The oldest known specimen of what developed into the present Aramaic script {called by the Rabbis square, or Asshuri, Assyrian) is a single word of five letters, discovered, at Araq-al-amir (former castle of Hyrcanus, east of Jordan), dating from 176 BC. Somewhere about this time the portions of the Old Testament then existent were copied from the Canaanitc-Moabite form into the oldest form of square script. It was impossible that minor mistakes of copying should not creep in, and as many copies were doubtless made, a somewhat uncertain form of text must have resulted.

As the ancient holy tongue sank lower in the consciousness of the people, the guardians of tradition (Massorah) devoted themselves to preserving the text inviolable not only in letters but also in pronunciation, and accordingly from the 5th century on they intervocalized the text with a system of vowel signs (derived from the Syrian?),— at the same time interpunctuating with an elaborate system of signs as guides to proper cantillation. Thus they superposed a vowel text upon the adopted consonants and therewith established for millenniums an interpretation thereof. Moreover, they not only vocalized, but also verbalized, for the earliest manuscripts were doubtless written continuously without any evident division into words.

Three systems of such signs are now known, Babylonian, Palestinian, Tiberian, developed between 500 and 900 AD But much earlier a number of so-called vowel letters, (consonants tending to quiesce into vowels, as in English draw, dray, from drag; plow, though, etc.) had been introduced as guides to vocalization, though forming no part of the earlier text, so that wherever such a letter is present the question may be raised, Is it original or a Masoretic insertion? The oldest dated manuscript of this so-called Masoretic Text (denoted by MT) is the Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus of 916 AD, but a very few others may be a century older. In any case it would seem that the Masorites have handed down with remarkable accuracy and fidelity the text that had established itself with the sturdy Rabbi Aqiba (d. 132 AD).

The Masoretic text has been handed down from a date earlier than the earliest existing copies of the Septuagint [aka LXX = 70], with a scrupulous care not paralleled in the history of other writings. It is traditionally claimed that this care in transmission goes back to the times when the books were written and collected. There is considerable evidence that might be gathered in support of this claim.

Hebrew was, of course, the native tongue of the Hebrew people; but it passed out of popular use three or four centuries before Christ (after the return from the exile), and was replaced by the Aramaic, which had come to be widely used as the language of travel and commerce throughout Western Asia. Most of the books of the Old Testament were written while the Hebrew was yet the spoken tongue of the people. After it had been crowded out from popular speech by the Aramaic, it still remained the literary and sacred language; hence it is not strange that essentially all the books preserved in the Canon were written in Hebrew, even those composed after the arrival of the Aramaic.

The Hebrew written language originally contained no vowels or vowel-marks. This, of course, means nothing less than that the Old Testament books were written simply in consonant outline, and in this form were preserved for many centuries. A Hebrew Bible or manuscript now has this consonant outline filled out with dots and other marks above and below, to indicate the vowels that should be understood. But these vowel marks are no part of the original Hebrew Bible. Then men read the various books as best they could from the consonants alone, supplying the vowels according to the seeming requirement of the sense, or the oral instructions which they had received from tradition.

The Hebrew word dbhr may have five different meanings, to wit: "a word," "he hath spoken," "to speak," "speaking," " it has been spoken," and "a pestilence," according to the vowels supplied. A familiar example of this is given in Heb. xi. 21, where Jacob is leaning upon the top of his 'staff '; but in the Hebrew Bible, as it is now printed (Gen. xlvii. 31), there is nothing about the 'staff'; but instead the 'bed.' Well, the Hebrew for 'the bed' is hammittah, while the Hebrew for 'the staff' is hammatteh. The consonants in these two words are the same, the vowels are different. But the consonants only were written. This, then, is the kind of written language in which the larger part of the Bible finds itself originally recorded.

A striking example of the false vocalization of the consonantal text is the following: In Jer. xvii, 9, occurs the familiar pronouncement, "The heart is deceitful above all (things) and desperately wicked; who can know it?" The word rendered "desperately wicked" is in consonants '-n-sh, vocalized by the Masorites, 'a-n-u-sh; but the Septuagint evidently vocalized it 'e-n-o-sh (man) and accordingly translated thus: "Deep is the heart beyond all things, and is man, and who shall know him?" Strange as it may sound, it was accepted, and when Irenauis was challenged by the Gnostics to prove the humanity of Jesus, he appealed (IV, 55) to this passage: "Again there are those [prophets] who say, He is a man, and who shall know him? [Homo est, et quis cognoscet eum?]

The consonant-group m-z-r-y-m, as vocalized in the MT, is pronounced Mizraim and translated Egypt, the apparent dual ending being referred incorrectly to Upper and Lower Egypt. In Assyria on the monuments it appears often, in various forms, as Mizir, Mizri, Muzri, Muzur, Muzuru, with many cognates, and means apparently border, frontier. As early as 1834, Dr. C.T. Beke deduced from Exodus that Mizraim was not always Egypt, but like so many Anglo-Saxon seeds of thought, this fell among thorns and was choked, though noted by Evvald. In 1874, Schrader renewed the observation, but not till about 1890, in a series of memoirs, did Winckler make clear from the inscriptions the existence of both a North-Syrian and a North Arabian Muzri, which required the frequent change of the Masoretic vocalization from Mizraim to Mizrim, and draws along with it a series of revisions both of the Hebrew text and of our whole conception of Israel's history. In particular, Winckler, followed by Cheyne, would find in this confusion of the two Muzris the single and simple origin of the legend of Israel's sojourn on the banks of the Nile.

This serious defect of the Hebrew Bible was not remedied until the seventh or eighth century after Christ, when the school of Jewish scholars known as the Massorites revised the Old Testament text with great patience, and added the vowel points according to their best ability ; but they had nothing to guide them except their own judgment and very imperfect tradition, and that they made numberless mistakes every Hebrew scholar knows. The oldest existing Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament goes back to the year 1009 AD and the oldest of any part of the Bible (the Prophet codex) goes back to 916 AD.

It used to be held that the vowel points were added to the Hebrew text by Ezra, in the fifth century before Christ, and that he was specially inspired of God for the work, so that he could make no mistakes. When, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this view was shown by Levita and Cappellus, in France, to be without foundation, and when it was proved that the vowel points were introduced by the Massorites more than a thousand years after Ezra, there was great excitement throughout all Protestant Europe. To many it seemed as if the new theory meant the utter subversion of religion; for if the vowel points were not given by divine revelation, but were only men's invention, and at so late a date, what dependence was there to be put upon the scripture text?

The inaccuracies that are found in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament are by no means all due to the want of vowel points. Many are due to the fact that it had to be copied for so many centuries by hand. Fortunately, two centuries or so before Christ the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, known as the Septuagint, was made in Alexandria. This has enabled the correction of many errors, and will enable the correct of more still, as it is studied more carefully — such errors, of course, as have crept into the Hebrew text since that translation was made. By comparing the Hebrew text with the Samaritan Pentateuch, too, some errors have been discovered and emended. And yet, all this is really very little, and promises little. There are still doubts about great numbers of passages all through the Old Testament, and probably there must always remain so, for want of any means of ascertaining what was the original text. One schola cites between seven and eight thousand places where manuscripts and versions differ; and another suggests ten thousand as the probable number of diversities of reading in the Old Testament.