Nine passages in the Bible are preceded and followed by signs usually called °inverted Nuns," because they look like the letter N in the Hebrew alphabet. These signs are probably of text-critical importance. Their real signifi cance is. however, unknown.
In 15 passages some words are stigmatized as a sign of deletion. At a later period a mar ginal reading takes the place of a stigma. The marginal readings are of a threefold character: (1) words to be read for those written in the text ; (2) words to be read for those not writ ten or omitted in the text ; (3) words written, but not to be read. The origin of these vari ants is manifold. Some represent various read ings in ancient manuscripts; others arose from the necessity of replacing erroneous expressions by correct ones, difficult, irregular, provincial and archaic, by simpler, current and appropri ate; or cacophonous by euphonious expressions. Some of them may have been designed to call attention to some mystic meaning or homiletical lesson supposed to be embodied in the text. Finally, and this at a later date, they represent variant readings found in Talmudic literature.
In traditional literature the observation is found that in some passages the number of which varies in the different sources as 7, 11, 13, 15 or .18, the Bible contains expressions other than the context would lead one to ex pect. To the question why this is so, the earliest sources answer: °the Bible uses euphemism.° The later sources, however, ex plain this by the assertion that the men of the Great Synagogue, i.e., the scholars of pre-Mac cabean times, had made corrections in the text. Modern investigators are inclined to attribute these peculiarities to the authors or redactors of the Biblical books themselves, the latter shrinking from putting in writing a thought which some of the readers might expect them to express. The assertion about the corrections made by the scribes is probably due to the tradition which ascribes the redaction of sev eral books of Scripture to the Great Synagogue.
Textual There are however, phenomena in the Biblical text which lead one to assume that at some time textual corrections had been made. These corrections may be classified under the following heads: (1) Re moval of unseemly expressions used in refer ence to God; e.g., the substitution of the verb bless° for ato curse° in certain passages. (2) Safeguarding of the Tetragrammaton; e.g., the substitution of Elohim for Yhwh in certain passages. Under this head some have counted such phenomena as the variants of the divine names id proper names, e.g., Joahaz for Jehoahaz. (3) Removal of application of the names of false gods to Yhwh; e.g., the change
of the name Ishbaal to Ishbosheth; or, accord in to another opinion, from Ishbosheth to Ishbaal. (4) Safeguarding the unity of divine worship at Jerusalum. Here belongs the change of the city of (Isaiah xix, 18) to that of °Destruction? A large portion of the Masorah is given to statistical data : how many letters, words, verses, sections and chapters there are in each book and in all of them together; which is the middle letter, word or verse in each book; how many words begin with a certain letter or combina tion of letters; how many times a particular form of word occurs in the Bible, etc. This feature probably has its origin in the early copyists counting the letters of the text to have a basis for calculating the charge to be made for their labor.
Beside the labors of fixing and guarding the purity of the text, the masorites put the world of scholars under the greatest obligation by in venting and introducing in the 6th century sys tems of vocalization and accentuation, embody ing the pronunciation as handed down in the schools of their time, and their understanding of the textual connection. A great deal of our grammatical knowledge of the Hebrew lan guage is based on their vocalization.
History and The history of the Masorah may be divided into three periods: (1) creative period, from its beginning to the introduction of vowel-signs; (2) reproductive period, from the introduction of vowel-signs to the printing of the Masorah in 1425; (3) crit ical period, from 1425 to the present day. The cultivation of masoretic studies both took its rise and had its culmination in Palestine. Still, it had already in the 2d Christian century its workers in Babylonia. In the course of time differences of spelling and pronunciation devel oped not only between the schools of Palestine and Babylonia, but in the various seats of learn ing in each country. In Babylonia the school of Sura differed from that of Nehardea; sim ilar differences existed in the schools of Pales tine, where the chief seat of learning in later times was Tiberias. These differences must have become accentuated with the introduction of graphic signs for pronunciation and cantilla tion; and every locality, following the tradition of its school, had a standard codex embodying its readings. The Biblical text accepted by us, its vocalization and accentuation, the Masorah in its contents and language, as well as the regulations with reference to writing of Biblical books, all are of Palestinian origin. Frag ments of text and Masorah originating in Babylonia have but recently been discovered.