The Masoretic Text

Hebrew was written with consonants only. For centuries scribes copied the books of the Hebrew Bible by hand, and to check their copies they counted the verses, words and letters of each book. By the early second century AD one form of the consonantal text had become standard among Jews; the Dead Sea Scrolls show that it goes back much earlier, and also that other forms of the text were in use beside it.

Between about AD 500 and 1000 Jewish scholars called the Masoretes, from masorah, “tradition”, worked chiefly at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. They added vowel points and accents to pass on the received reading, with notes in the margins. Where they thought a copyist had erred, they left the written word and noted what was to be read. Readers said Adonai, “Lord”, in place of God’s name YHWH, and the Masoretes wrote the vowels of Adonai with it — the origin of the form “Jehovah”. The Aleppo Codex, pointed by Aaron ben Asher in the 10th century, survived riots in 1947 only in part; the Leningrad Codex, copied in AD 1008, is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript and the base of today’s scholarly editions.