The Masoretes ( he, בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה, Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Masters of the Tradition') were groups of

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

scribe-

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researc ...

s who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily in

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

Palestine (

Jund Filastin Jund Filasṭīn ( ar, جُنْد فِلَسْطِيْن, "the military district of Palestine") was one of the military districts of the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham (Levant), organized soon after the Muslim conquest of the Lev ...

) in the cities of Tiberias and

Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...

, as well as in Iraq ( Babylonia). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of

diacritical A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

notes (''

niqqud In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud ( or ) is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the ...

'') on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions, and

cantillation Cantillation is the ritual chanting of prayers and responses. It often specifically refers to Jewish Hebrew cantillation. Cantillation sometimes refers to diacritics used in texts that are to be chanted in liturgy. Cantillation includes: * Chant ...

of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' Tanakh The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
'' ben Asher Aaron ben Moses ben Asher (Hebrew: ; Tiberian Hebrew: ''ʾAhărōn ben Mōše ben ʾĀšēr''; 10th century, died c.960) was a Jewish scribe who lived in Tiberias in northern Israel and refined the Tiberian system of writing vowel sounds in Hebr ...

family of Masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...

, although there existed an alternative Masoretic text of the

ben Naphtali Ben Naphtali ( Hebrew: אַבּוּ עִמְרָן מֹשֶׁה בֶּן דָּוִד בֶּן נַפְתָּלִי; Tiberian Hebrew: ''ʾAbbū ʿĪmrān, Mōše ben Dāwīḏ ben Nap̄tālī'') was a rabbi and Masorete who flourished around 890- ...

Masoretes, which has around 875 differences from the ben Asher text. The halakhic authority

Maimonides Musa ibn Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (); la, Moses Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym Rambam ( he, רמב״ם), was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Tora ...

endorsed the ben Asher as superior, although the Egyptian Jewish scholar, Saadya Gaon al-Fayyumi, had preferred the ben Naphtali system. It has been suggested that the ben Asher family and the majority of the Masoretes were Karaites. However,

Geoffrey Khan Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA (born 1 February 1958) is a British linguist who has held the post of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge since 2012. He has published grammars for the Aramaic dialects of Barwari, Qaraqosh, Erbil ...

believes that the ben Asher family was probably not Karaite, and Aron Dotan avers that there are "decisive proofs that M. Ben-Asher was not a Karaite." The Masoretes devised the vowel notation system for Hebrew that is still widely used, as well as the trope symbols used for cantillation.

References

External links

"Masorah"
in ''

The Jewish Encyclopedia ''The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day'' is an English-language encyclopedia containing over 15,000 articles on th ...

''
The Role of the Masoretes (PDF)

in the ''

Encyclopaedia Judaica The ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' is a 22-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, holidays, langu ...

'' Hebrew grammar Jewish scribes (soferim) Language of the Hebrew Bible {{Hebrew-lang-stub

References

Further reading

External links