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Manuscripts

The Masoretic Text

The most famous source for reconstructing the original text of the Tanakh.
Written in Hebrew, with several passages written in Aramaic (square) letters.
During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews converted to Aramaic, but their scriptures remained in Hebrew (now called Paleo-Hebrew or Hebrew).
In order to adapt the old text of the Tanakh to the new conditions, the Hebrew letters were replaced by Aramaic letters (4th-2nd century B.C.).
Most of the Masoretic text is Hebrew in Aramaic writing.

The principle of the work of the scribes

The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribes who worked from the fifth to the tenth century.
They were known for meticulous accuracy in their work with the biblical text.
The Masoretes never altered the text they received for copying.
If the scribe thought the text he received contained an error, he wrote his corrections between the lines or in the margins without changing the text.
To correct the text, the Masoretes created a special system called ketiv and kere

Ketiv (written) is what was written in the text received by the Masoretes.

Kere (read) is the correction of the text made by the Masoretes in the margins.

In places where the Masoretes made corrections, the rabbis, when reading the text, were to read kere (correction) rather than ketiv.
This system was also used to identify discrepancies in different manuscripts.
Another way of correcting the text was by means of hanging letters.
If a scribe thought that a letter was missing in a word, he put the missed letter not in one row with other letters, but a little higher.
This would let him know that this letter was missing in the original text.

The Masoretic text belongs to a large group of texts (about 6,000) whose contents are very similar.
They have been generally accepted in Jewish communities for centuries.
The oldest complete Tanakh made by the Masoretes and available today is the 10th century.

Masoretic elaborations of the text:

  1. The Masoretes divided letters into words and introduced gaps between words in the text.
    Before them, the entire text and all the words were written together. The separation of words was memorized by the rabbis.
    The division of the text by verse was earlier (II-Vth century).
    The numbering of chapters and verses was arranged after the Massoretic period (in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively).
  2. The text received by the Masoretes was devoid of vowels.
    The rabbis memorized the pronunciation of the words.
    In the eighth century, the Masoretes added voicing to the text in the form of dots and dashes written above and below the consonants.
  3. The Masoretes also added accent marks to read with intonation.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The next most important ancient manuscripts of the Tanakh are the recently found Dead Sea Scrolls (1947).
Among these manuscripts are documents written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and even Paleo-Jewish.
They are much older than the Masoretic manuscripts and were copied some 200 years before Christ by the Qumran community of Yeseis who lived in the Judean Desert.

The Qumranites preserved the text of the Tanakh exactly; they did not introduce the unique teachings of their community into the text.
The scrolls found at Qumran are virtually identical to the Masoretic text.
Nearly 200 biblical texts have been found there, but most are fragments of biblical books, with the exception of one manuscript containing the entire book of the prophet Isaiah.
All of the canonical books of the Tanakh are represented in the Qumran find, with the exception of the book of Esther.
The non-biblical books found at Qumran include apocryphal, pseudographic, and books describing the teachings of the Qumran community.
The Qumran manuscripts are similar to the Masoretic text, some similar to the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some similar to the Greek translation of the Tanakh, the Septuagint.

Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritans recognized only the Torah as God's Word and therefore copied only it.
They made their version of the Torah in the 2nd century B.C., but copies have survived to this day that date from the 10th to the 13th centuries.
It is written in Hebrew without capitalization.
There are copies written in paleo-Jewish script.

If you compare the Samaritan Pentateuch with the Masoretic text there are about 6,000 differences between them (mostly orthographic).
It agrees with the Septuagint in about 2,000 of the 6,000 deviations from the Masoretic text.
It notes instances of distortion of the text to support one's own doctrine.

There are other Jewish manuscripts as well.

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