The Masoretic Text: How Jewish Scribes Preserved the Hebrew Bible

Between roughly AD 500 and 1000, families of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes developed an extraordinary system for safeguarding the Hebrew Scriptures — counting letters, marking vowels, and annotating every unusual spelling so that no copyist’s slip could pass unnoticed.

This article will examine how the Masoretic Text became the standard Hebrew Bible, what the Aleppo and Leningrad codices are, and how the Masoretes’ precision compares with the much older scrolls found at Qumran. (Placeholder article — full research to come.)