Was the Bible Actually Improved?
A group called the “Masoretes” (often dated to the ninth century C.E.) recorded and annotated what has become the “authentic” version of the Hebrew Scriptures. Their work is recognized today by Jewish religious leaders as being authentic. This group’s name comes from Hebrew word “MESORAH” which is ultimately from the verb “MASAR”, meaning “to hand down”. The leaders and Rabbis who busied themselves with the “MASORAH” were called the “MASORETES”. The oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible still in existence today is about 1000 years old.
The Masoretes (sometimes called “Masorites”) apparently became dissatisfied with the traditional Hebrew text since it was written without vowels, or at least only with the three consonsants which can be treated as vowels (Yud, Hei, Vav). These three letters became known by their Latin name “matres lectiones”, which literally means “mother of meaning”. In other words, it was very difficult to read Hebrew without vowels until these three “helper” letters became used as vowels. They are also known in Hebrew as “Am Qiria” (mother of reading). The Yud and Vav are more often vowels than consonants.
The Masoretes began adding diacritic marks to provide information not found in the original Hebrew. For example, the letters SHIN and MEM-SOFIT can be read “SHEM” (meaning: name) or “SHAM” (meaning: there). Thus, a person reading the Biblical text would have to read “SHEM” or “SHAM” depending on the context. By adding vowel marks above, below, or in the middle of the consonants, the Masoretes made it obvious that the correct reading is either SHEM or SHAM. Basically, they added the “AH” sound (with a QAMATZ) or the “EH” sound a TZEREH. Later, some Latin-based language also added disacritical marks, such as the tilda, grave acccent, and umlaut.
Rather than relying on the three “matres lectiones” consonants that act as vowels (YUD, HEI, VAV), the Masoretes used small marks, usually dots and dashes, above, below or through a letter to show how the letters are to be pronounced based on a common understood meaning or tradition. You might be surprised to know that the three words SHEM (name), SHAM (there) and SAM (put) are all spelled the same when using only consonants (SHEM follwoed by MEM-SOFIT). Thus a beginner who runs across these letters, must choose his punctuation based on the context of the sentence. Would it be nice if there were just vowels?
Reading from a Torah scroll can be somewhat difficult because most of the sentences join together without any punctuation. Sometimes white-spaces occur at the end of passages, but yet most sentences run together. The Masoretes added a few symbols, mainly the period, and also the MAQEF which joins related words such as the noun-construct pattern. The MAQEF basically acts like a hyphen between words.
The Tiberian Masoretes consisted of five families, but the two most well known are the ben-Asher and Ben-Naftali families. They actually disagreed, and other authors even discussed their differences, leaving us a record of the same. In addition to the Tiberian Masoretic system of vowels, two other, lesser-known systems have been preserved, the first being the Babylonian system, and the second being the “Land of Israel” system (often called “The Palestinian” system).
Today, one of the most famous bibles, produced according to the Massoretic tradition is “The Leningrad Codex”. When most people think of “The Hebrew Bible”, they are thinking of copies of this Bible. A codex, a Roman invention to replace scrolls, is similar to books we have today, basically pages joined with a cover (but obviously created long before the printing press). The Leningrade Codes is housed in the National Library of Russia, and dates to about 1009 C.E.. It is the oldest extant copy of the Hebrew Bible that includes the complete text. It is still in excellent condition after a thousand years, and contains amazing examples of medieival Jewish art.