Masoretic: (from Hebrew Masorah, 'handed over') The Masoretic texts are partly Hebrew and partly Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., what Christians call the Old Testament) with accompanying explanatory notes or marginalia. A group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes approved them for general use in Judaic biblical scholarship and reading between the first and ninth centuries CE with a few late additions in the tenth century. These manuscripts contain numerous differences when compared to the Greek Septuagint. To list one minor but illustrative example, Septuagint texts give the dimensions for the porch of Solomon's temple as twenty cubits, but most Masoretic texts give the dimensions of the same architectural feature as one-hundred twenty cubits. Other differences range from the trivial to the striking. For linguists and biblical scholars, Masoretic texts are especially important because the Masoretes who wrote them introduced the Hebrew convention of using dots and symbols under, above, and inside consonant letters to represent vowel sounds. Previous Hebrew texts only marked consonant sounds, which left the meaning of many words ambiguous and rendered it difficult to verify comparative studies showing how similar or different Hebrew was from closely related languages such as Akkhadian, Amorite, Arabic, Ugaritic, Proto-Canaanite (which developed into both Phoenician and Classical Hebrew), Eblaite and Elamite.

 

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Masoretic: (from Hebrew Masorah, 'handed over') The Masoretic texts are partly Hebrew and partly Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., what Christians call the Old Testament) with accompanying ex . . . View Full Definition

Septuagint: A Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) produced in the third century BCE. According to an apocryphal legend found in the 'Letter of Aristeas,' seventy-two Jewish scribes wer . . . View Full Definition