Portal:Bible/Featured article/February, 2008

The Masoretic Text (MT) is the Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible (Tanakh). It defines not just the books of the Jewish canon, but also the precise letter-text of the biblical books in Judaism, as well as their vocalization and accentuation for both public reading and private study. The MT is also widely used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles, and in recent decades also for Catholic Bibles. The MT was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. Though the consonants differ little from the text generally accepted in the early second century (and also differ little from some Qumran texts that are even older), it has numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to (extant 4th century) manuscripts of the Septuagint, a 3rd to 2nd centuries BC Greek translation in popular use in Egypt and Palestine and often quoted in the Christian New Testament. The Hebrew word mesorah refers to the transmission of a tradition. In a very broad sense it can refer to the entire chain of Jewish tradition (see Oral law), but in reference to the masoretic text the word mesorah specifically means the diacritic markings of the text and concise marginal notes in manuscripts (and later printings) which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words. The oldest manuscripts containing substantial parts of the Masoretic Text known to still exist date from approximately the ninth century AD, and the Aleppo Codex (pictured), the oldest complete copy of the Masoretic Text in one manuscript, dates from the tenth century.

Read full article