Sources: The Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible; the Aleppo Codex (~930 AD); the Leningrad/St. Petersburg Codex (~1008 AD, the oldest complete MT); Jacob ben Chayyim’s first printed Hebrew Bible (Venice, 1524–25).

The Masoretes (from masorah — tradition) were rabbinic scholars of Tiberias and Babylon (~500–1000 AD) who standardized the text of the Hebrew Bible by adding vowel points (nikud), cantillation marks (taamim/trope), and marginal notes (masorah) to the consonantal text that had been transmitted without vowels. Before the Masoretes, Hebrew was written without vowels — the reader supplied them from memory and tradition. The Masoretic achievement: (1) The vowel system — the Tiberian Masoretes (Ben Asher family of Tiberias) developed the nikud system that became standard; (2) The cantillation marks — indicating both musical recitation patterns and syntactic punctuation; (3) The masorah parva and magna — marginal notes recording unusual forms, letter counts, and variants to ensure accurate transmission; (4) Kethiv and Qere — where the written text (kethiv, “what is written”) differs from the traditional reading (qere, “what is read”) — often for theological sensitivity (divine names, euphemisms). The Ben Asher tradition defeated the rival Ben Naphtali tradition and became the received text. The Masoretic Text is the basis of virtually all Jewish and Protestant Old Testament scholarship; the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1947) showed that the MT is remarkably stable for most books, though with variants that illuminate textual history.