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p.1 Those who wrote and kept the Scriptures In the time of Ezra the prophet, there were men trained to write the Scripture. This was a group known as the Soferim (Scribes); they preserved the sacred traditions of Israel’s Scripture. At this point the Jewish scribes solidified the following process for creating copies of the Word of God. At first they were merely transcribers of God's law for the synagogue readers. The Jewish Sopherim, had a high regard for the Scriptures as being the Word of God, they regarded the copying of any error as a sin. (Read more: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/soferim . Certain words in the text were not to be read out loud, such as the name of God. Yahwehwas considered to be too sacred to spoken (take his name in vain). The Sopherim scribes rules were that before they started copying the Word, the scribe must wash his whole body. When he came across the name of God, (YHWH), he had to stop and wash his whole body again, to begin translating again, and this would continue throughout the entire manuscript he was copying. However, before he began to write the name of God it was to be with a pen newly dipped into the ink. The black ink was prepared from a special recipe that was used only for the Scripture. This was as you can imagine, extremely tedious and time consuming process to make sure everything on a page was correct to prevent any alteration. One mistake on it and the parchment was condemned. Imagine writing a whole page and at the last line make a mistake; you would have to start all over again. Each scroll had to be checked within thirty days of its writing, or it was considered unholy. In the Babylonian Talmud (Qidd. 30a) says, “The early [scholars] were called soferim because they used to count [sfr] all the letters in the Torah.” (now known as Gematria, each letter had a number accompanying it). The ancient Bible books were on scrolls, also used in the synagogue and kept with great care. Sacred books were forbidden to be touched with bare hands (Shab. 14a; 133b and had to be wrapped in mitpa, made of linen, silk, or leather. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found preserved in these linen wrappings.) Most of these ancient Hebrew Scrolls found are written in the standard "square" ("Hebrew") script, very similar to today’s Modern Hebrew, there are several that are written in paleo-Hebrew, an ancient script from the First Temple period. They later became interpreters of God's law whose responsibility was to teach the Torah, were called the Levites. Israel was then to provide for their living by giving the tithe to them so they can be dedicated to teaching the Scripture to the people. The Hebrew language was originally written only in consonants, which consists of 22 letters in the Hebrew Alphabet. The Old Testament Bible was written as consonantal text, which only the Hebrews would have a understanding of the language pronunciation. In Hebrew, vowels make a large difference in pronunciation of words. A change in a vowel can also change the meaning of a word. An example often used in English is the difference between “SHIP” and “SHOP”. These words have very different definitions. If our language were written without vowels, both of these words would be written as “SHP.” which would make these words indistinguishable, this why vowels are important. The most extensive change the Masoretes brought to the Hebrew text was the addition of vowel points in the Scripture (without the vowels it was called Paleo Hebrew.) In an attempt to solidify the consistent “correct” readings of all the Hebrew Scriptures, the Masoretes added a series of dots and dashes to the text, put above and below the letters, identifying the vowel to use for pronunciation. The Masoretes employed a strict system of checks and balances to make sure that the text was copied accurately by the Scribes. Numbers were also used, placed at the end of each book, telling the copyists the exact number of words that a book contained in its original manuscript. From 500 B.C. to 100 A.D. , the Sopherim (scribes) handled the Scripture preserving Israel’s sacred texts. To preserve traditional spoken readings, starting in the fifth century C. E., a group of Jewish scribes, known as the Masorete’s carefully selected, copied, and annotated biblical scrolls by adding vowels and accents to the ancient Hebrew consonants in their process of transcribing the Scripture. Though the Masoretic scribes added these vowels to the ancient text long after it had been written, they were trying to preserve the traditional vocalizations of these words that date to earlier times. The Masorete’s produced several different systems of vocalization (writing in vowels) between 500 and 700 C. E. Until the last few decades, most biblical scholars believed that the Masoretic biblical texts were, with few exceptions, the best witnesses to the most ancient Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). Today the Masoretic text is universally accepted as the authentic Bible in Hebrew. Recent discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, suggest that there were several different versions existing of the many biblical books in the Second Temple period. Some of these versions differed only slightly from each other, but some other versions were very different in certain areas. After the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans in 70 C. E., the Jews were dispersed across the ancient world, preserving these versions of the Hebrew Scriptures in their communities. One of these groups preserved the texts that would later become the Masoretic Text. Others are preserved in versions such as the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation that occurred 250 years before Christ. There are in existence roughly over 12,000 plus Hebrew Manuscripts. These include the following: Nash Papyrus. (2nd century B.C. and 1st century A.D.) that contains Deut. 6:4-9 and some fragments from the Decalogue Exodus 20:2, Deut. 5:6. This text is 1,000 years older than the Hebrew text which our Old Testament is based on. There are very few differences between the reading of this text and that of that 1,000 years later. The most important Masoretic medieval manuscripts are the Aleppo Codex, which dates to the 10th century C. E., and the Leningrad Codex, which dates to 1009 C. E. The original Hebrew writings did not have vowel points until Moses ben Asher. In the 10th century C. E., the ben Asher scribal family of Tiberias produced a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that Maimonides, a famous Jewish scholar, declared to be the best known version of the ancient sacred text. This Tiberian Masoretic text and its particular version of vowels and annotations became the standard, authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible for Judaism, and the rabbi’s. Aleppo Codex contain the Whole Old Testament and was compiled and vowel pointed by Moses ben Asher some time prior to or in the year 930 A.D., presently in the Hebrew University in Israel. The Leningrad Codex of the Prophets. [Also called the Babylonian codex of the Later prophets] (A.D. 916) containing Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. The Leningrad Codex (A.D. 1008-09) one of the oldest codexes contains the entire Old Testament text. It was copied by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. The Masoretic Text is the version held as authoritative and used liturgically in most synagogues today. The Catholic Church since the time of Jerome (fourth century C. E.) and most Protestant Christian churches have used this version as their source text for modern translations. p.2 Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people of Jesus’ Day (See also The Hebrew Masoretic text ) |
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