What is the Masorah?
The Torah comes with a great deal of baggage. After several thousand years as the Torah of the Jews, its baggage is sophisticated and significant. The traditions surrounding the Torah text, our Biblical Text - Five Books of Moses - written on parchment scrolls and then published in books, have several apparatuses created to preserve the integrity and accuracy of the text through generations of reproduction. As it's "the divine work of the Master of the Universe," then it's pretty important for the words and the spelling to be accurate.
The Torah text is the string of letters written on parchment, constituting a Sefer Torah, a Scroll of the Torah. Tradition has it that any additional or missing letter would make the scroll invalid for ritual use; for the 'dot of an i' it goes from sacred to not-sacred. This certainly explains why the ancient Sages were concerned with preserving the text of the Torah and reproducing it accurately.
A famous statement in the Mishna Avot 1:1 (known as Ethics of the Fathers) compiled by R' Judah the Prince in late first century CE says:
משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים, וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה. הֵם אָמְרוּ שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים, הֱווּ מְתוּנִים בַּדִּין, וְהַעֲמִידוּ תַלְמִידִים הַרְבֵּה, וַעֲשׂוּ סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה:
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.
The idea of a 'fence around the Torah' is echoed in another statement in Avot. The text tells us that Rabbi Akiva preached that מסורת סייג לתורה -'tradition/masoret is a fence to the Torah'. This typically terse Rabbinic statement unpacks to mean that 'the tradition/masoret', the traditions regarding how the text is to be written, is a 'fence for the Torah' ie. a mechanism for preserving the integrity of the Torah. This could be the earliest reference to the primary system the Sages created to preserve the text called 'The Masorah'.
Documentation of the development of the Masorah is meagre. We have a few potential references to the Masorah through the Talmudic Period, approximately ending in the 6th Century. We think that the process of compiling the oral records of the spelling of words in the Torah, the textual anomalies found in the Torah and other special conditions seen in the scroll began to be recorded in the seventh century. It recorded traditions and textual information amassed over hundreds of years. These 'data points', several hundred thousand coded notations, were compiled and eventually recorded on the pages of
codices, medieval parchment-bound books. Only in the 10th Century did the giant of Jewish scholarship, Moses ben Maimonides, declare what we call 'the Aleppo Codex' (right) to be the officially accurate text of the Bible with accompanying Masoretic notes. Notwithstanding Maimonides' declaration, there were several versions of 'the Masoretic Bible' in circulation stemming from somewhat different traditions and Masoretic compilations. This situation is even seen today and is studied by scholars.
Aside from some texts which contain only Massoretic notes, scribes developed conventions enabling them to be included in the codices themselves. In the below diagram, left hand, you can see the notes in the margins on all 3 sides, and between columns. The notes between the margins are the 'small masorah / masorah parvah' which make note of something in a word or phrase. The notes in the margins above and below, 'large masorah/masorah magna' elaborate on the smaller notes, often with references to similar and different instances of the word throughout the rest of the Bible.
As the graphic on the left shows, sometimes scribes used their design talents to embed the masoretic notes into a text in an appropriate graphic. The text is from the Book of Jonah.
This image (right) shows the first page of Genesis and demonstrates how artists used the text of the Masorah to embellish the text with appropriate images.
Why don't we hear more about the Masorah today? In the early days of the printing press, publishers hired scholars of the Masorah to produce a proper, accurate text which would be accepted by the rabbis and the community. Once the 'edited' text went to press and was printed hundreds or thousands of times, its version of the accurate text, whatever it was, gained stature. Eventually, the community and the publishers just reproduced from of 'official' printed texts. The profession of masorah scholar became even more rare.
In reality, any Hebrew Biblical text we come across depends on the masorah for accuracy somewhere in its lineage. All of the synagogue Bibles used in any congregation anywhere today contain more or less evidence of masoretic notes. Hint: look for small words in the margins around the text or between the lines of the text.
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