The Masoretes (, lit. 'Masters of the Tradition') were groups of
Jewish
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
scribe- scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily in the Jewish centers of the Levant (e.g., Tiberias and
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...
) and
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...
(e.g., Sura and Nehardea). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes ('' niqqud'') on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions, and cantillation of the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" . '' Tanakh) for the worldwide Jewish community.
The ben Asher family of Masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text, although there existed an alternative Masoretic text of the ben Naphtali Masoretes, which has around 875 differences from the ben Asher text. The halakhic authority
Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (, ) and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam (), was a Sephardic rabbi and Jewish philosophy, philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah schola ...
endorsed the ben Asher as superior, although the Egyptian Jewish scholar, the Saadya Gaon, 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 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.
The nakdanim were successors to the Masoretes in the transmission of the traditional Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
References
Further reading
* ''In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language'', Chapter 5.
* ''The Text of the Old Testament''.
* ''Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah''.
* ,
Encyclopaedia Judaica
The ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' is a multi-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, Jewish holida ...