The earliest printed editions of the Hebrew B. bear it close resemblance to the MSS.
They are without titles at the commencement, have appendixea, are printed on parch ment with broad margin, and large ill shaped type, the initial fetters being commonly ornamented either with wood-cut engravings or by the pen. These letters, however, are often absent. With vowels, the editions in question are very imperfectly supplied. Sep arate parts 'of the 13. were first printed." ThePsalins appeared in 1477, probably at Bologna; the Pentateuch at Bologna, iu 1482; the Prophets in 1486; the Hagiographa in 1487. To most of these were sub joined the rabbinical commentary of Kiincla. 1 he whole of the Old Testament appeared in small folio at Soucino. 1488. and appears to have been followed by the edition of Brescia (1494i, which was used by Luther iu his translation of the OM Testatneut. The Mblig PoPyglotta Complatensig (1514-17), the lalia flabriittiro of Bamberg, edited by Rabbi Jacob-Ben-Chajia (Venice. which has been adopted in most of the subsequent editions—the Antwerp IVItlig Polyglotta (8 vols.. 1569 72), also the editions by Hutterns (Hamburg, 1587, and .frequentiv reprinted), 13uxtorf (Basel, 1611). and especially that by Jos. Atliias (Amsterdam, 1661-67)—all these are celebrated. and have supplied the basis of later editions by Simon. Hahn, 'Ilene, and others. In the 17th c., a vehement controversy' arose regarding the integrity of the Hebrew text; one party maintained that the Masoretic text was greatly corrupted, and contrasted it unfavorably with that of the Samaritan Pe,ntateueli. The chief advocates of this view were VossiuS. Whiston, Morin. and Capellus. On the other band, Buxtorf. Arnold 13ootius, Wasinuth, and others, defended the absolute purity of the Masoretic text, even to the inspiration of the vowel-poiuts, which Buxtorf, in the preface of his grandfather's Tiberias, gravely asserts to have been first invented by Ezra. This con troversy had at least mie good result. It led to an extensive exatnination of Hebrew MSS. in the next century. Kennleott collated 630. 258 throughout, the rest in part; Dc Rossi, 751, of which all hot 17 were collated for the first time. Many still retntun uncol lated. The result of this elaborate itivestipttion has been to convince scholars that the Masoretic text is substantially correct. All known codices confirm it; the oldest of the professedly literal versions. as well as the Targums of the time of Christ, furnish sim ilar satisfactory evidence; and when we consider the bibliolatrous tendencies of the ,Jews after their return from exile, whatever may have been the case before, we may safely conclude that we now possess the text, of the Old Testament much in the same con dition as it was at the close of the canon.
At first, there were no intervening spaces between Hebrew words; afterwards, small Intervals appear to have •been•oecusionally allowed. With the introduction of the aware character, the use of small interstices to separate words became general. The Talmud prescribes how much space should be between words in sacred 31SS. designed for the synagogue. Various divisions according to the sense were also introduced at an early period. In the Pentateuch there were two, termed respectively open and closed. The former were intended to mark a change in the matter of the text; the latter, slight changes in the sense. Of these. the Pentateuch contained 669, named pirs/tioth (sections). This division is probably as old, or nearly so, as the practice of reading the Law. It is found in the Talmud, while the division into 54 great parshioth is first found in the Massorah, and is not' bserved in the rolls of the synagogues. The poetical books were also subjected, from a very early period, to a stichometrical division, according to the peculiarities of Hebrew versification. In order to facilitate the reading and understand ing of the prose books, a division into logical periods was also made, which is men tioned in the Mishna (q.v.), while in the Gemara (q.v.) its authorship is ascribed to Moses. From it sprang our present division of the Scriptures into verses. It is highly probable that these.divisions were long handed down orally. Our present division of the Old Testament into chapterS is a later invention, and, though accepted by the Jews, is of Christian origin: it may be dated as far back as the 13th c., some assigning it to Cardinal Hugo, others to Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. It was first employed in a concordance to the Vulgate, whence it was borrowed by Rabbin Nathan in the 15th c., who made a similar concordance to the Hebrew Bible. Nathan's divisions are found in 13omberg's Hebrew B. of 1518. Verses were first introduced into editions of the Hebrew B. by Athias of Amsterdam, 1661, but were employed in the Vulgate as early as 1558. The first English B. divided into verses was published at Geneva in 1560.