I was asked in a PM for some references. Here is one dealing with the Tanakh:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/driver1.html
Here are some quotes from the article:
The Old Testament consists of a collection of works composed at various times from the twelfth to the second century B.C.; and much of it, e.g. genealogies, poems and stories, must have been handed down by word of mouth for many generations. It contains, however, scattered references to written texts; but how extensive or widely current these may have been cannot be said, as no manuscripts have survived from the period before the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jews into exile in 587/6 B.C. The text therefore is not infrequently uncertain and its meaning obscure.
The whole Old Testament is written in classical Hebrew, except some brief portions which are in the Aramaic language (Ezra 4.86.18 and 7.1226, Jeremiah 10.11, Daniel 2.47.28), a sister language which became the
lingua franca of the Semitic world.
The earliest surviving form of the Hebrew text is perhaps that found in the Samaritan Pentateuch (GenesisDeuteronomy). This text must date from a period before the secession of the Samaritans from Judaism, but it is preserved only in manuscripts the earliest of which is tentatively assigned to the eleventh century A.D. It differs from the orthodox Jewish text in some six thousand places, in about one third of which it agrees with the Greek translation, the Septuagint; a few of these differences are doctrinal or political in origin (e.g. Deuteronomy 27.4), a small number are helpful in difficult passages of the traditional Hebrew text, but the majority have little if any importance. The next witness to the Hebrew text is provided by the Scrolls from Qumran, commonly called the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated c. 150 B.C. to A.D. 75 or thereabouts. These include fragments, often minute, of every book in the Old Testament except Esther, one complete scroll of Isaiah and another of which approximately half has been lost, and a commentary on the first two chapters of Habakkuk containing most of their text. All these agree essentially with the 'received text' of the Old Testament except for orthographic variations or occasional variant readings hardly affecting the sense, and so suggest that stabilization of text is already beginning.
Fragments, however, of Samuel and one of Jeremiah have a shortened form of the text like that of the Septuagint in these books. The only other fragment of this period is that known as the Nash Papyrus, which cannot be exactly dated, containing two excerpts from the Law (Exodus 20.217 and Deuteronomy 6.45); its chief interest is that the words are more or less clearly spaced.
Very few manuscripts are said to have survived the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Soon after that disaster, therefore, the Jewish religious leaders set about defining the canon and finally standardizing the text. This last process went on for many centuries and resulted in the production of an eclectic text based on arbitrary rather than scientific principles. This was the Massoretic (so called from the Hebrew massorah, 'tradition') or traditional text found in all Hebrew Bibles.
This text was written in a purely consonantal alphabet, although the scribes at Qumran had already attempted to indicate the vowels by using certain letters for them (for example w for o and u, and y for e and i). This system, however, was soon found inadequate when, except in very restricted circles, the use of the old Hebrew language was dying out. Accordingly, in order to preserve the correct pronunciation in school and synagogue, the Massoretes inserted signs above or below or within the consonantal symbols to indicate this. Several systems are known, but that devised by the Rabbis of Tiberias (hence known as 'Tiberian') in the fifth to sixth centuries A.D. eventually prevailed.
What they preserved, however, was not so much the original pronunciation as that current amongst themselves; further, however helpful these vowel-signs may have been, they are demonstrably not always correct. The present translators have therefore held themselves free to disregard the vowels and to re-vocalize the consonantal text wherever that seems desirable.
This text perpetuated not only genuine divergent readings but also numerous slips of the early copyists, made at a time when it was not copied with such meticulous care as in subsequent ages when it had come to be regarded as canonical and sacred; even then, however, many fresh errors found their way into it. The Rabbis soon felt the need to take account of and preserve any divergences that seemed to them important. They therefore listed a number of variant readings, omissions from and additions to the text as known to them, as well as possible corrections, which perhaps were often nothing but the conjectures of individual scribes. The consonants, however, were generally regarded as unalterable, and the usual method of indicating corrections adopted by the Massoretes was to attach the vowels of the word which they wished to be read to the consonants of that written in the text, although it might be an entirely different word.
......
The Hebrew text as thus edited by the Massoretes became virtually a single recension probably remaining substantially unaltered from the second century A.D., but this text has not survived in any manuscripts dated before the ninth to eleventh centuries A.D. Unsatisfactory as it may be, however, it is perforce reproduced in all printed Hebrew Bibles. These began to appear late in the fifteenth century, when printed copies of single books or groups of books came from various presses, followed by the first complete Bibles in 1488 and 1491; but the text of Jacob ben Chayyim's Rabbinic Bible (Venice, 15245) is that found in most modern Bibles. Collections of various readings were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unfortunately taken from late manuscripts and therefore of relatively little value. The most-used modern edition, with selected variations from Hebrew manuscripts and the principal divergences in the ancient versions implying a different Hebrew text, together with emendations proposed by modern scholars, is the third edition of R. Kittel's
Biblia Hebraica (Stuttgart, 1937). It is the basis of the present translation.
The Hebrew text as thus handed down is full of errors of every kind due to defective archetypes and successive copyists' errors, confusion of letters (of which several in the Hebrew alphabet are singularly alike), omissions and insertions, displacements of words and even of whole sentences or paragraphs; and copyists' unhappy attempts to rectify mistakes have often only increased the confusion. (my emphasis added)
S
In all the places I looked I found no mention of Judaism, much less Messianics...
