Jewish scribe-scholars who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, based primarily in early medieval Palestine in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq on the Masoretic Text. Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions and cantillation of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, for the worldwide Jewish community.
The
Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of Tanakh for Rabbinic
Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls have shown the Masoretic Text to be nearly identical in consonant text to some texts of the Tanakh dating from 200 [BCE] A recent finding of a short Leviticus fragment, recovered from the ancient
En-Gedi Scroll, carbon-dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD, is completely identical with the Masoretic Text.
The Masoretic Text was used as the basis for translations of the
Old Testament in
Protestant Bibles such as the
King James Version and
American Standard Version and (
after 1943) for some versions of
Catholic Bibles, replacing the
Vulgate translation, although the Vulgate had itself already been revised in light of the Masoretic text in the 1500s.
Masoretic Text - Wikipedia
