8. THE MASORAH. Masorah or Masao rah is the name given to the body of critical notes on the external form of the Hebrew Aramaic text of the Old Testament. The name is taken from Ezek. xx, 37, and means orig inally "fetter' the fixation of the text having been correctly looked upon as a fetter on its exposition. In later times the word assumed the meaning of "tradition." This body of notes represents the literary labors of a long line of scholars, very few of whom are known by name, who flourished during a period of about 17 centuries — from about 300 B.c. to the invention of printing. They were mostly copy ists or professional scribes or teachers of the Bible and their notes were the outcome of a close application to their professional work.
Object and The chief object of the masoretic notes was to serve as a guide to the copyists and enable them to produce a faultless Bible-text. They were written on the margins of private Bible-codices or between the lines and collected in a. body before or after such codices or finally compiled in special in dependent works. In Bible-scrolls designed for public use at the synagogue no notes were per mitted in accordance with the injunction of Deut. iv, 2. The amount of masoretic notes differs greatly depending on the amount of space at the copyist's disposal; on the size of the script used, the pr-ice of the writing mate rial and of the scribe's labor and on the fanci ful shape he gave to his glosses, which were sometimes written so as to form ornamental decorations to the book.
The independent works are arranged topic ally in numbered groups or rubrics; the inter linear and marginal notes, however, follow the order of the text, forming a kind of running annotation. Presumably in the course of time a certain technique was worked out with re gard to the distribution of masoretic material. Certain matter was designed preferably for the intercolumnal and outside perpendicular mar gins; other matter for the upper and lower margins, etc. The former is known as the Inner or Small Masorah, the latter as the Outer or Large Masorah; the glosses surrounding the initial word of a book, usually written on a separate line, are called the Initial Masorah.
The term Large Masorah is also applied to the lexically arranged notes at the end of the printed Bible, usually called Masoretic Con cordance or Final Masorah.
The Small Masorah consists of brief notes with reference to marginal readings, to statis tics, showing how many times a particular form occurs in Scripture, to full and defective spell ing and to abnormally written letters. The Large Masorah is more copious in its notes. The Final Masorah comprises all the longer rubrics for which space could not be found in the margin of the text.
The old Hebrew text was in all probability written in continuous script, without any break, and some of its words were abbreviated. The masorites divided the text into words, books, sections, paragraphs, verses and clauses (prob ably in the chronological order here enumer ated), the various divisions being indicated by spaces. They fixed the orthography, pronunci ation and cantillation, and introduced the square characters or modern Hebrew script. To indicate various teachings, legal or popular, religious or mystical, they formed some letters in some words in an abnormal way; some are larger, other smaller than the rest, some have their strokes or bars curved, others have them drawn out in a scroll, still others have scroll like and semi-circular attachments, or a broken stroke. Most of these graphic peculiarities are of a late date and their vogue was short-lived; the printed Masorah either ignored them or did not know them, and some of the terms referring to such peculiarities were already mis understood by specialists in the 14th century. More of a purely caligraphical origin are the titles or apices on certain letters of alphabet.
There are four words having one of their letters suspended above the line. One of them, the n in the name of Manasse (Judges xviii, 30), is due to a correction of the original Moses, out of reverence for the latter. The origin of the other three (Ps. lxxx, 14; Job xxxviii, 13, 15) is doubtful. In the opinion of some they are mistakes for large letters; according to others they are later insertions of originally omitted weak consonants.