How We Got the Bible Part 1: The Masoretic Text

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"How We Got the Bible: Transmission and Translation" with Pastor Sean Finnegan. Session 1: The Masoretic Text

In this first session of “How We Got the Bible,” I want to drill down on the question, “where do Bibles come from?” specifically looking at the Old Testament. There are two parts to this class: transmission and translation. First we will look at transmission, and that is the whole world of manuscripts – a fascinating world of archeology and foreign languages and stories of discovery.

The Bible has two parts, but our main focus for this session will be the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh. The Christian Old Testament has 39 books in it, but the Jewish Bible has 24 books. However, they have the same material. The Jews combined 1 and 2 Samuel into “Samuel”, and did the same with Kings and Chronicles. They also combined Ezra and Nehemiah, and combined the 12 minor prophets into one book. The Christian Bible organizes the Old Testament by genre: history, poetry, and prophecy. The Jewish Bible organizes scripture by the genres of Torah (Law), Nevi’im (Prophecy), and Ketuvim (Writings). There are 23,213 verses in the Hebrew Bible. 22,944 of them are in Hebrew, and 269 of them are in Aramaic. Hebrew and Aramaic share the same alphabet.

Where does our Hebrew text come from? Manuscripts. “Manuscripts” are, by definition, handwritten documents. In 1440, Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press. This revolutionized books. When we talk about biblical manuscripts, we are talking about handwritten documents that predate the 1440s. “Autograph” refers to the original manuscript. “Extant manuscripts” are any copies that exist today, usually stored in a museum somewhere in the world. “Scribes” are people who copy manuscripts. A “textual variant” is a word of phrase that differs between manuscripts. When a biblical manuscripts wears out, the orthodox Jewish custom is to put the scripture in a place called a “genizah” – a repository of old manuscripts.

Sources of the Old Testament include the Masoretic Texts (MT), the Samaritan Pentateuch, and translations such as the ancient Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin translations.

The Masoretes were Jewish scribes active 500-1000 A.D. in the region of Tiberias along the Sea of Galilee. The Masoretes were highly skilled scribes. They added vocalizations, accents, cantillation marks, and other marginal notes to the biblical text. They employed incredibly reliable standards to ensure the accurate preservation of the text. Hebrew manuscripts copied by the Masoretes are known as “Masoretic Texts”.

The Masoretes added a system of specialized notes on the text: the Masorah, which is actually made up of three components. The Masorah Parva (small Masorah) refers to notes written in the side margins of the manuscript. These notes refer to certain word-use statistics for the Hebrew Bible. The Masorah Magna (large Masorah) was traditionally recorded in the top and bottom margins of the manuscript. These notes contain particular details. For example, if the Masorah Parva notes that a word occurs only three times in the Masoretic Text with a particular spelling, the Masorah Magna will provide the references where those three instances can be found in the text. There is also a Masorah Finalis (final Masorah) found at the end of biblical books or at the end of sections of the Hebrew Bible. The Masorah Finalis contains specialized information about the number of words in the book or section, the middle word of the book, the middle consonant, and so forth.

Masoretic Text manuscripts include the Codex Cairensis (896), the Petersburg Codex (916), the London Codex Oriental 4445 (925), the Aleppo Codex (925), the University of Michigan Torah (950), the Damascus Pentateuch (1000), the Leningrad Codex (1010), the University of Bologna Torah Scroll (1155), and the Mikraot Gedolot which is 16th century text that the King James Bible (KJV) is translated from.