Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Yosef: The Masoretes did not create the version of the Bible. They had traditions, and their goal was to determine which of the traditions should be accepted and which of them should be denied.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Professor Yosef Ofer of Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. He was my PhD supervisor, and so he is my teacher. He’s also the Vice President of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Shalom, Professor Ofer.

Yosef: Shalom, shalom, Nehemia.

Nehemia: It’s wonderful to be here with you today. I’m really excited! You’ve got a really important book that recently came out, and let’s just show the people here. It’s called Ha’Masora l’Mikra u’Dracheha. But don’t freak out, because he has an English translation as well, which is The Masora on Scripture and its Methods. And if you’re studying the Masora, which we’ll explain what Masora is, he’ll explain, this right now is the definitive work. This is it! This is a key text you need to be studying.

Professor Ofer, let’s start with a really basic question. You wrote a book on the Masora; what is the Masora?

Yosef: So, the Masora was created in the 9th or 10th century, and its goal is to preserve the version of the Hebrew Bible. Now, centuries ago, there were many differences in the versions of the Bible. If we go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can see that even two scrolls that were found in the same cave in Qumran differ from each other in many, many details of the Bible.

Now, the Masoretes believe that the Bible should only be one version. If there is some dispute, they have to decide what’s the right version and they did it using some of the accurate books of the Masora. Then they had to determine one version of each word in the Hebrew Bible, and then they had to guard these versions to prevent any errors that may occur. So, they used different methods to create these procedures of keeping, even the spelling of each word, if it’s written defective or plene. So, they wrote many, many notes, comments, in their books, to keep the accurate version of each word.