[Mesorah] first section of Details of Masorah

[Mandel, Seth via Mesorah]

Since there is a range of knowledge among the people who will read this, I am writing a brief introduction to make sure we are all on the same page when I start discussing the points I wish to write about.



As members of this list know, the Mesorah is extremely complicated.  In fact, it is just like other mitzvoth from the Torah, consisting of wheels within wheels within wheels, or, as it is phrased in halokho, “במה דברים אמורים.”

The Mesorah was laid out for all 24 books of the T’NaKh, and is concerned with every issue: קרי and כתיב, מלא and חסר, what we call vowels and consonants, what Ashk’nazim call “trop,” and what the Mesorah calls גיעיה and מקף.  Not only are these all matters of the Mesorah, they are all interconnected.  It is a fundamental error to think that one can discuss vowels, for instance, without discussing the trop (as aficionados of ’et with a tzere vs. ’et with a segol know).

Unfortunately, several factors have contributed to most modern Jews being completely ignorant of Mesorah:



1)            Printed T’NaKhs have gradually left out more and more of the Mesorah.  I know of no editions in the past 200 years (except for scholarly works) that have printed the Mesorah Q’tanna or G’dola, even though they were in Ibn Adonyah's printed T'NaKh and in several editions that came later (such as the Warsaw edition).  Most recent printings of T’hillim omit even the trop.

2)            Various printings and grammarians have taken the issue of גיעיות into their own hands, and have totally ignored even the cases where the Masorah comments on them.  This goes back hundreds of years, to the first printing, since many of the manuscripts themselves varied greatly. [I use the name גיעיה for the vertical line, because that is the word used by the Masorah: it appears, vocalized, in some of the Masoretic notes that are appended to the Leningrad Codex.  The term "meteg," as well as the terms "meteg kaved" and "meteg qal," which we will discuss below, were invented apparently by יהב'י (Y'qutiel haNaqdan ben Y'hudah, last half of 12th Century].

3)            Various people, under the influence of their spoken language, consider the מקף as separate from the issue of vowels and trop, and so even some editions of T’NaKh without vowels or trop put in the מקף.



The result is that most Jews nowadays, even "ba'alei q'ri'ah" who try to be careful about the proper pronunciation, and most "grammarians" are almost totally ignorant of the Mesorah, its function, and what it shows us.

Ignorance is bliss, and, indeed, most Jews can do fine without the Mesorah.  However, for those who want to really understand the Hebrew in the Holy Scriptures, it is indispensable to try to find out what the Ba'alei Mesorah and Ben Asher himself, whom we theoretically pasken according to, held and told us about how to read and write the Scriptures.



In my article in Jewish Action, I described the fact that in the time of the early Geonim (and perhaps earlier) three distinct systems had been developed for Hebrew vocalization.  (I did not describe there the fact that the different systems not only showed differences in pronunciation, but many "grammatical" differences.)  The most complex of them all with the most fully developed method of showing trop and other details was the Tiberian system.  In the books of the T'NaKh, the Tiberian system also contained the Masoretic notes.  Due to several factors, among them its attention to detail, the Tiberian method was adopted by all Jewish communities around the world, and so in the Medieval Era all Jewish communities had manuscripts of the T'NaKh that included the Mesorah.  However, the quality of the manuscripts in various communities varied significantly, up to the point where certain manuscripts cannot really be called "Masoretic," because they violate what the Masorah stated.

Another point that I did not address in my article was that the Tiberian system first appears in the 7th Century, virtually fully-blown.  However, the final work of the Masoretes did not occur until Aharon Ben Asher, in the 10th Century.  The Masoretic notes themselves quote Masoretes who lived in the 9th Century.  The disagreements between Ben Asher and Ben Naftali, which are listed in many Geniza fragments, date to the 10th Century.

The Jewish immigration to the Rhine Valley took place under Charlemagne in the 8th Century.  So manuscripts the Jews took with them did not have Ben Asher’s final reworking of the Masorah.  This alone could explain why most medieval Ashkenaz manuscripts of the T’NaKh are among the furthest from the Ben Asher system.

In addition, because of the complexity of the Masorah, most manuscripts contradict themselves: for example, a Masoretic note may say that a certain word appears 3 times חסר and once מלא, whereas in the text, it appears twice חסר and twice מלא

When printing was invented, the editors of the Hebrew T'NaKh had to choose manuscripts to use.  Unfortunately, the manuscripts from Italy and Ashkenaz were, in general, the poorest in quality, and they were used for the first printings by the Soncinos.  However, Ya'akov Ibn Adoniyah did quite an amazing job in the Great Rabbinic Bible published by Daniel Bomberg in 1525.  He recognized the importance of the Mesorah and printed both the Q'tanna and G'dola.  He he attempted to gather the best manuscripts of the T'N'aKh from around the Jewish world, and what he called "Miqra'ot G'dolot" remained the standard for all subsequent printings for 400 years, and  for most printings even today.  Indeed, his version was a very significant improvement over previous printings and over many manuscripts.

However, he did not have the best manuscripts that we have today.  And in particular, in the realm of some of the details, his edition was far indeed from the Masorah of ben Asher.  Two of the features that differentiate Ben Asher’s Masorah from others lie in the area of the use of the גיעיות and the hataph vowels.

I will refer all those who wish to read more about the Bomberg T’NaKh and how great an accomplishment it was and its shortcomings to the two articles of Menachem Kohen in his edition of the T'NaKh, "Mikra'ot Gedolot 'HaKeter,'" Bar Ilan University, Joshua-Judges, 1992, "Introduction to the Keter Edition," and Kings I-II, 1995, "Introductory Chapters."

As Menachem Kohen points out in "Introductory Chapters," for some reason for the גיעיות and the hataph vowels Ibn Adoniyah did not use the method he used for fixing the consonants, vowels, and trop.  For the latter, he indeed did what he set out to do, try to establish an authoritative text from the evidence of the manuscripts he had.  For the former, he seems to have used the edition of Felix Pratensis published by Bomberg in 1517. the first Hebrew Bible printed by Bomberg, with a Haskama from Pope Leo X (!!! after all, Bomberg was Catholic, and Pratensis had converted from Judaism 10 years before).  In any event, the גיעיות and the hataph vowels in Ibn Adoniyah's edition do not reflect the Masorah of Ben Asher.  And, since all subsequent editions were based on this edition, most Jews have not an inkling of these two features that characterise the Masoretic manuscripts (not just the Aleppo Codex, but all the mss that show the signs of coming from the Ben Asher school).



Although there was much discussion 50 years ago whether the Aleppo Codex was actually from Ben Asher, today it has been established beyond a reasonable doubt that it is, and, in all probability, was the Codex that the Rambam himself used and referred to as authoritative in Hil Sefer Torah 8:5.  Unfortunately, we do only have less than 70% of entire Codex it.  The closest manuscript to it is the Leningrad Codex, which, although it follows the same Masorah and system as the Aleppo Codex (including in the details we will discuss), is inferior to it in accuracy.  For years, the Aleppo Codex was could only be seen by special permission in the Sifriyah L'umit, but now everyone can see it, in all its beautry and painstaking detail, at http://www.aleppocodex.org/newsite/.



These are little details, and, indeed, one should ask why are they of significance to most Jews.

The answer is that the details they are very significant in trying to understand one of the most murky aspects of the Bible.

The system of noting vowels and trop developed by the Tiberian Masoretes are significantly superior, in their detail, not only to the Babylonian and "Palestinian" vocalization systems, but to virtually all vocalization system developed back then or since for other languages.  The Tiberian system distinguished not only between the major trop (the "מלכים"), but also between minor trop (the "משרתים"), and not only between different vowels, but between vowels of different length (regular versus the hataph vowels).  However, for some reason, the system uses the same sign, called "sh'wa," to represent both a short vowel and no vowel at all (in which case its function is to show that the consonant above it is pronounced; silent consonants have no sh'wa).  Later grammarians distinguished between the two.  Nowadays, following the Qimchi family, we refer to them as "sh'wa nach/ s'hwa na‘," but before the Qimchis the terms "sh'wa nach/sh'wa nad" were more widely used (and they were used by the Rambam, Hil. Q'ri'at Sh'ma‘ 2:9).

How does a Jew know which is which when reading the T'Nakh? Easy: he follows the rules taught in school or printed in some books.  Currently, children are taught 5 rules: the sh'wa is na‘, i.e. pronounced, if it is a) at the beginning of a word, b) the second of two consecutive sh'was, c) under a letter with a dagesh, d) after a t'nu‘ah g'dolah, e) under the first of two identical letters.

These rules have been adjusted by various people to account for some exceptions, but, in whichever exact form people learn them, they are ultimately from the pen of the Bahur, R. Eliyah Bahur Levita (1549), a prolific grammarian.  In actuality,they do not match many of the statements of Ben Asher.  In particular, his statement that a sh'wa between two identical letters is always na‘ is so far from the truth, that there was a discussion in the early years of the State of Israel whether they should in fact teach it in school.  The limmud zechus on the Bohur is that he was trying to simplify the rules for people who did not have access to the Masorah.

That is enough for the first section; I apologize that I cannot see how I can discuss this with more brevity.  And I encourage those who are bored to skip the next installments; all will be labeled “Details of Masorah.”

Since I will be discussing many words with hataph vowels, I would like to know whether you all can see the hataph vowels in these two words: עֲזוּבָה וַעֲצוּבַת

If not, I shall have to send my next sections as PDF files.


Seth Mandel

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