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MASORETIC TEXT

Any text of the Hebrew Bible produced by the Masoretes (from Heb. baʿălê hammāsôrâ), textual scholars concerned with the precise transmission of the text who were active ca. 600- 950 c.e. There were three major groups of Masoretes: the Palestinian, Babylonian, and Tiberian. Since work of the Tiberian school gained prominence over the other two, the standard Tiberian tradition of the Hebrew text is today commonly referred to as the MT.

The Tiberian Masoretes differed with each other on minor matters, and texts produced by the ben Asher family came to be revered as the best of the Tiberian tradition. The last of this family was Aaron ben Asher, and his achievements are incorporated in two widely used Masoretic manuscripts: the Aleppo Codex (A), the basis of the Hebrew University Bible Project; and the Leningrad Codex (L), the base text for BHS. Tiberian manuscripts generally contain four components: the consonantal text, the vowel signs, the accent signs, and the Masoretic notes written in the margins.

There is no such thing as the Masoretic Text. It is more accurate to refer to representatives of the MT, such as the text of the A or L. The text of the Second Rabbinic Bible edited by Jacob ben Chayyim (1524-25) was for centuries considered the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible and thus was frequently labeled the MT. Modern scholarship, however, has shown that the Second Rabbinic Bible was based on relatively late manuscripts, and thus is probably not the best representative of the MT. Most modern editions of the Hebrew Bible print some form of the MT, but BHS (based on L) is currently the standard scholarly edition of the MT in the West.

See Masorah.

Bibliography. C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1899, repr. New York, 1966); M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text,” in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 79-122; repr. in The Canon and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible, ed. S. Z. Leiman (New York, 1974), 666-709; H. M. Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon: The Masoretic Text: A Critical Evaluation,” in Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Ginsburg, i-xlv; E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, 1992); E. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, 1995); I. Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. SBLMasS 5 (Missoula, 1980).

Daniel S. Mynatt