The Massoretic Text

In his article What Is the Masoretic Text?  The Beginners Guide, author Ryan Nelson opens with “Most Jews and Protestants consider the Masoretic Text the authoritative Hebrew Bible . . . written sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries AD . . . most English translations of the Old Testament are based on the Masoretic Text”.  Nelson’s states that the Masoretic text “was based on the meticulously preserved oral tradition and the best available manuscripts of the original Hebrew text”.

By Nelson’s account “manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were lost in the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD, so the rabbinic community began transcribing the oral tradition”, and “about a millennium before the Masoretic text was finished, rabbis began notating the original Hebrew with punctuation and additional letters to help readers correctly interpret the text”.  He states that “the Mishnah preserved the oral tradition in written form”.

According to Nelson, “by the ninth century . . . a popular Jewish sect known as the Karaites (‘readers’) was advocating for Jews to abandon the rabbinic tradition and read the ‘unadulterated’ (or rather, uninterpreted) Hebrew Bible . . . to save the Hebrew Bible . . . the Masoretes  produced a new copy . . . they used rabbinic tradition to add the most intricate system of punctuation and stress marks anyone had ever seen . . . so there could only be one way to read and understand it; the same way rabbis had for centuries.” 

Nelson makes this all sound perfectly wonderful, however as Katharine Bushnell stated in her book God’s Word to Women, “when we speak of the Bible as inspired, infallible and inviolable, we do not refer to our English version, or any mere version, but to the original text . . . written without any spaces between words in totally different looking letters from those we call ‘Hebrew’ at the present time; and the language as first written contained no vowels.” (#5). 

As Bushnell explains “Hebrew . . . was practically a ‘dead language’ as early as B. C. 250 . . . in the absence of expressed vowels, its pronunciation was likely to become lost.  So the Scribes took four consonants, ‘a h w and j’ and inserted them into the text to indicate vowel sounds . . . (that) in the end led to confusion” (#6).  She considers these changes to be “uninspired” (#7), added by Jews who were “bitter opponents of the teachings and of the spirit of Christianity”, and “held women in utter contempt” (#8).  She demonstrates how “the Word might be changed into insipid nonsense, perhaps, by the manipulation of two or three consonants of a vowel less language” in #9 – 15.

According to the British Library, the first complete printed text of the Mishnah was compiled around 200 by Judah the Prince, becoming the earliest authoritative body of Jewish oral law, containing the teaching of rabbinic sages.  The Mishnah supplements the Torah which are the first five books of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, that form the basis of Jewish written law.  Around 500 AD the rabbis added the Gemara (‘sea’ of learning) to the Mishnah called the Talmud (‘teaching’).  https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-complete-mishnah

That the Jewish law was compiled by a man with the title ‘prince’ could only mean the Sanhedrin had been reestablished, after being destroyed along with the temple in 70 AD.  According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the Sanhedrin had been the supreme religious body in Israel before the destruction of the temple, headed by a president, title ‘prince’, and vice president, titled ‘father of the court’, with 69 sages, to total 71 members, which according to Hellenistic sources, the Sanhedrin was a political and judicial council headed by the country’s ruler.

The fact that the Sanhedrin, the very people who had Yahshua put to death, are the authors of the Massoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, is very disturbing.  Bushnell’s claim that they were “bitter opponents to the teachings and spirit of Christianity” is all the more poignant.  Yahshua rebuked the Scribes and Pharisees, saying that Isaiah prophesied about them teaching as doctrine the precepts of men, nullifying, disregarding, seting aside the word of God for the sake of their tradition in Matt 15: 1 – 9 and Mark 7: 4 – 13, and he said “you are of [your] father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.  Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own [nature], for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44.

In a University of Calgary writeup on the Mishnah, it states “Mishnah can refer in a general way to the full tradition of the Oral Torah, as formulated by the Rabbis in the first centuries of the Common Era”, confirming it was “compiled by Rabbi Judah the ‘Prince’, before his death around 217 C.E.”  However, it contradicts “to a view that appears in many histories and introductions” that the traditions were written down, “but merely determining and organizing of a fixed text that was subsequently disseminated by memory”, likely because, as Nelson stated, it was “a forbidden project: transcribing the oral tradition.”  https://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudMap/Mishnah.html

The New World Encyclopedia (NEW) states the Massoretic text (MT) is “the Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible (Tanakh)’, also used in Protestant Bibles, and in recent decades Catholic Bibles.  The MT was copied, edited, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7^th and 10^th centuries AD.  The Hebrew word mesorah refers to the transmission of Jewish tradition, including the markings of the text and marginal notes in manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.  The MT has numerous differences compared to the Septuagint (and the Samaritan Targum as we discuss in the section below).  https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Masoretic_Text 

According to NEW, the Hebrew word masorah (מסורה, alt. מסורת) is “taken from Ezekiel 20:37 and means originally ‘fetter’.  The fixation of the text was considered to be in the nature of a fetter upon its exposition.  When, in the course of time, the Masorah had become a traditional discipline, the term became connected with the verb (‘to hand down’), and was given the meaning of ‘tradition’”.  But looking at masoreth and related words below, I believe it means ‘taking captive with false instruction’.

The word masoreth מסרת (Strong’s 4562 1 occurrence) means ‘bind, gird, harness, hold’, used in Ezek 20:37 in the context of Yahweh using the rod to bring Israel into the bond (masoreth) of the covenant, but there is evidence against this text being inspired.  The root asar אסר (Strong’s 631 70 occurrences) means ‘to tie, bind, imprison’, found in Isa 61:1 prophesying the Messiah who will “. . . proclaim to the captive’s liberty and to imprisoned (asar אסור) opening of the eyes/prison (peqach-qoach  פקח קוח).”  The root masar מסר (Strong’s 4560 2 occurrences) means ‘commit, deliver’, from a primitive root that means ‘to sunder, set apart, or apostatize’ – apostatize means ‘renounce religious or political belief or principle’, or mosar מסר (Strong’s 4561 1 occurrence) means ‘instruction’.