Ancient Jew Review is pleased to host this panel, first presented at SBL 2019 in San Diego as “ A Beginner's Guide to the Masorahs of Four Great Early Manuscripts as Represented in Recent Printed Editions.”

The Masorah of the Leningrad Codex in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) Edition

The objective of this article is to give an overview of how the Masorah of BHS works. I will assume that the reader is generally familiar with the Masorah. For example, in the sample from BHS below, there is one Masoretic note on the third line. The word יִדְאֶ֖ה has a circule over it. That tells the reader it should be matched with a Masoretic note. In this case, it is the note ב̇ , “occurs two times.”

For a full treatment of how the mechanics of the Masorah works, see Kelley, Mynatt and Crawford, 46-69.

Image 1 below is the first page of text in the Leningrad Codex: Genesis 1:1-26. The Leningrad Codex is the basis for BHS, and thus its Masorah is the starting point of the Masorah of BHS. The Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, dating from around 1008. Its colophon claims that the manuscript was copied from exemplars that were written by the esteemed Masorete Aaron ben Asher. For more information on the Leningrad Codex, see Wurthwein, 36-7.

Masorah Parva (Mp) notes generally count word or phrase occurrences. These notes are the brief markings that are in the side margins of the columns. In Image 2, several examples of Mp notes are circled in red. These notes are in Aramaic shorthand or abbreviations. For example, the Mp noteלׄ means that the word occurs only one time; it is unique. The note ד̇ means that the word occurs four times. The note may give additional information, such as how it is spelled, whether the word occurs at the beginning of a verse, or occurs primarily in a specific book of the Bible. For a glossary of Masoretic terms, with examples, see Kelley, Mynatt and Crawford, 69-193.

The Masorah Magna notes generally give the location of the occurrences by citing “snippets” from the verses where they occur. We are accustomed to chapter and verse citations, like “Jeremiah 13:2.” The Masoretes lived in the days before concordances and chapter/verse divisions. They identified specific verses by giving short quotations from the verses. Thus, the Mm notes give these short verse “snippets” for each verse, identifying for the reader the location of each verse. These notes are naturally lengthier, and they are in the upper and lower margins. Image 3 shows an example. The fact that a reader could identify the location of a verse by a short quotation from it demonstrates a familiarity with the Hebrew text that surpasses most of us today who rely on concordances.

Image 4 gives approximately the same section in BHS that is represented in Image 1 for the Leningrad Codex. Notice that BHS is set up in roughly the same way, with the Mp notes along the side margins. We will return to the Mm notes below.

BHS made two big innovations, when compared to previous editions of the Hebrew Bible with the Masorah.

Innovation #1: BHS “Completed” the Masorah Parva Notes

Although there should be a Mp note for each occurrence of a text feature, that rarely happens. Typically, the Mp notes appear with only a few of the occurrences. The editor of the Masorah of BHS (Gerard E. Weil) “completed” the Mp notes so that a note is matched with each occurrence.

For example, the Mp of עִמְּךָ֖ in Genesis 26:3 is י̇ב̇ בתו̇ר (occurs twelve times in the Torah). One would expect that this Mp note would occur with each of the twelve occurrences. In fact, the note actually occurs with only four of the twelve references in the Leningrad: Gen. 21:22, 26:3, Deut. 20:20, 22:2. In the Masorah of BHS, all 12 of the occurrences will have the Mp note because the editor “completed” all of the references.

The same word or text feature can be the subject of more than one Mp note. Thus, one might wonder what would happen if one word was an occurrence in two or more Masoretic rubrics. In other words, if Weil “completed” every Mp note in the Leningrad Codex, and if words might be the subject of more than one note, then how did he put two or more Mp notes on the same word?

The answer is that Weil had to edit multiple notes into one cohesive note. Sometimes, the results are a bit messy. For example, in the Leningrad Codex in Genesis 49:11, the note for the word עִירֹה is “The Qere is עִירוֺ.” See Image 5.

In BHS, this simple note has been combined with another so that it looks much more complicated. See image 6.

The note now says: “The Qere is עִירוֺ̇. This is one of 16 occurrences written ה in the Torah, and it is unique in this form.” The combination of “completed” Mp notes produces some complicated and occasionally awkward marginal notations.

Innovation #2: The Masorah Magna Notes Are in a Separate Volume

Recall that in the Leningrad Codex, the Masorah Magna (Mm) notes are in the top and bottom margins. See Image 7 for some examples in the codex.

In BHS, all of the Mm notes have been exported to another book. This is best illustrated by way of an example. In Deut. 28:55, the word יֹאכֵ֔ל, has the Mp note 53 י̇ג̇ (occurs 13 times). See Image 8.

The superscript number 53 tells you to look for a note in the Masorah apparatus at the bottom of the page. See Image 9.

The note in the Masoretic Apparatus tells you to go find the entry for Mm 784 in this book: Weil, Gerard E. Massorah Gedolah. Vol. 1. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971. This volume contains all of the Mm lists in the Leningrad Codex. Instead of printing them in BHS, they were all exported to this supplementary volume. See Image 10.

Inside this book, you will look for list 784, which happens to be on page 95. Image 11 shows you what page 95 looks like.

Image 12 is a close-up of only list 784. It gives the location of the 13 occurrences.

These lists are also heavily edited. Image 13 shows what this Mm list looks like in the Leningrad Codex. The area in highlight is the actual note and the snippets for the individual occurrences.

The changes in Massorah Gedolah are not simply a matter of putting the Hebrew into a nice typeface. Weil has added a number of editorial changes to make the book easier to use for the reader. For example, the book abbreviations and the chapter/verse locations are now included. See Image 14.

Additionally, Weil made emendations, like adding a missing snippet. In this list in the Leningrad Codex, the snippet for Number 6:3 is absent (the brackets indicate this for the reader). Weil added it so that the occurrences can be complete. See Image 15.

The Masorah of BHS has plenty of other quirky notations that are nowhere to be found in the Leningrad Codex, for example, notes marked “sub loco” or “contra textum” in the Masoretic apparatus. These relatively rare notations should not distract a new user from learning how to use the Masorah of BHS. Kelley, Mynatt and Crawford, 54-57, discusses these and other unusual notations.

Works Cited

Kelley, Page H, Daniel S. Mynatt and Timoghty G. Crawford. Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1998.

Weil, Gerard E. Massorah Gedolah. Vol. 1. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971.

Wurthwein, Ernst. The Text of the Old Testament. 2d ed. Translated by Erroll Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.

Daniel Mynatt is the Vice Provost for Institutional Effectiveness at the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor.