[Mesorah] second section of Details of Masorah

[Mandel, Seth via Mesorah]

I am having some “production difficulties,” since my materials are in various places.  So I am sending a very short continuation this time; the next I hope will be meatier.



The notes of the Masorah are written in Aramaic, usually abbreviated, between the columns of the text.  A small circle over the word signifies what the note refers to.  A couple of examples:

  עֵדְו‍ֹתָיו ה' מפקין וי'ו

שׁלְ

That means that there are 5 occurrences in the T’NaKh of the word with the vav after the dalet pronounced (just like “מפיק ה'א means that the he’ is pronounced).

עָם י'ו' וכל זקפ' ואתנ' וסופ' פסוק' דכות'

That means that there are 15 occurrences in the T’NaKh of the word with a qomatz, but every case where the word   has the trop zaqfa, etnachta, or sofa dipsuqa it also has the qamatz (this only refers to the wordעם  when it is by itself and not if it has a prefix).

ראשי האבות ב' וכל כתיב' דכות' ב' מ' ז'

That means that there are only 2 occurrences in the T’NaKh of this pair of words with the he’ in front of the second word, but every case in the K’tuvim (Aramaic K’tivin) where the pair occurs has the he’ except for 7 cases ( בר מן ז').



Outside of the Masorah in the Aleppo Codex (and the related codices), there are a couple of other sources which are necessary for this discussion.

One is a book called Kitaab alKhilaf (sefer haHillufim in Hebrew), which is primarily a list of the differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naftali.  Ben Naftali was a Masorete who lived at the same time as ben Asher, and the differences, as is to be expected, are in real kleinigkeiten: whether a syllable has a ge‘ayah, what the m’sharet trop is on a word.  There are only 2 or three systematic differences: Ben Asher punctuates the name to be read יִשָּׂשכָר, whereas Ben Naftali puncuates is יִשְׁשָּׂכָר (and Moshe Mocheh, another Masorete, read it יִשְׂשָּׂכָר.  When a prefix such as bet or lamed is added to words beginning in /yi/, Ben Asher puts in a sh'wa (e.g. l'yisra'el), whereas Ben Naftali punctuates it a lisra'el, with the yod elided.  Since the sh'wa in that position is pronounced as a hiriq according to Ben Asher, the difference in pronunciation is tiny indeed.  I have attached as a PDF file a page from one of the versions of Kitaab alKhilaf, and you can see, that in the first example, the difference is the trop on the word ‘im, and in the second, the difference is whether there is a ge‘ya on the word pen.

Another composition of the Masoretes is called Sefer Okhla v'Okhla.  It list pairs or groups of words that are very similar, but vary in small matters.  The first entry, whence the name by which the book is referred to, reads:

אלפא ביתא מן חד וחד חד א' וחד וא' ולית דכוותנון meaning "a list of all the word in the T'NaKh that appear only twice, once with a vav at the beginning and once without, in alphabetical order."

Another (#44) is titled

כ' זוגין מן חד וחד חד מלרע וחד מלעיל וא' בריש תיבתא וליתא meaning "a list of 20 pairs of words beginning with aleph that appear only twice, one of which is "mill'ra‘ [here meaning punctuated with a sh'wa or patah] and the other mill‘eil [meaning a “heavy” syllable, punctuated with a patah and dagesh or a qametz in place of a dagesh] [For example, the first pair is Isaiah 51:2 vs/Gen. 27:33]  (One can imagine such lists being of great interest to the Masoretes, but not so interesting to the rest of us mortals.).  The entire book is available online at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101065583708;view=1up;seq=11

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel
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