Masora

The Masora, or Masorah, is additional word lists and counts that served as a kind of index during the first millennium of the Christian era. It refers to a body of notes on the textual traditions of the Hebrew Scripture.

Masorete

Masorete, or Massorete, was one of the groups of Jewish scribes who compiled the Masora. They worked to preserve the text of the Old Testament as well as develop notes based on Jewish traditions.

Masoretic Text

The authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible. It was most likely completed in the 10th century AD, although there are many disputes over when it was actually written.

In Context

"One distinction between the text in a Torah and in a Hebrew Bible is that the latter includes both vowel notations and punctuation. These notations were regularized by scribes in eighth- and ninth-century Palestine who specialized in copying biblical texts, the Masoretes. According to historian Leila Avrin, the Masoretes wanted to ensure that not a single word of the scripture was lost. When tenth- and eleventh-century masoretic books, such as the Leningrad Codex or the Aleppo Codex, are compared with similar texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the consonant shapes and placement are extraordinary close" (Robinson 56).

"When copying Hebrew Bibles, for example, one scribe would typically copy the consonantal text, another would add the vowel and punctuation marks, and a third would add the Masora, additional word lists and counts that served as a kind of index, to the margins" (Robinson 57).