The Origin of the Masoretic Text in the Light of Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls

The nineteenth century witnessed the general acceptance of the view of Rosenmüller and Lagarde that the widespread uniformity in the existing manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible is to be traced to an archetypal codex. According to this theory, the archetype was adopted by Rabbi 'Aqiva and his school during the first half of the second century C.E., as a basis for their detailed system of hermeneutics, by which each particle of the Biblical text like et, gam and 'akh as well as plene and defectiva spellings in the Biblical text were utilized for the derivation of Rabbinic law. This archetypal manuscript was recopied again and again and thus became the basis of the Masoretic text.
Lagarde's view was subjected to increasing criticism during the first half of the twentieth century when the textual variants from the Masoretic text to be found in the Geniza fragments, in Talmudic citations and other sources, were increasingly brought to light.
As a result, the regnant view has been that the process of fixing the official text began with Rabbi 'Aqiva, but took centuries to complete and did not reach its present form until the Masoretic schools of the 8—10th centuries, if not later.
This view of the history of the Masoretic text, as the present writer maintained two decades ago, ignores fundamental considerations which have been substantially strengthened by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the implications that flow from them. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the basic purpose of the Masoretes was the preservation of the accepted text which reached them, and not its improvement or emendation.
This conclusion, which may be validated from many angles, is demonstrated by the Kethib-Qere apparatus in the Masora. The earliest stages of the Kethib-Qere, which numbers some 1350 examples all told, is essentially that of a guide to the reader against blasphemy and obscenity or against errors in reading, due to the defective spelling and the absence of vocalic system. The Kethib-Qere apparatus was then utilized for another extremely important purpose—the preservation of the important variants in the Masoretic text, while safeguarding the text itself against change. This collation and preservation of variant readings was the latest step in many earlier efforts to deal with the textual problem, which are vouched for by our Rabbinic sources.
According to Rabbinic sources, Ezra and the scribes, who preceded the Rabbis of the Mishna, are responsible for such phenonema as "dotted words", tiqqune sopherim and 'itture sopherim. Researches into the present form of the Masoretic text discloses that another early device that was utilized for the purpose of preserving variations was that of conflation, by which parallel readings were both inserted within the Masoretic text, even at the cost of grammatical difficulty and redundancy. We have discovered some forty such conflate readings in the Masoretic text, and undoubtedly there are others.
Since these methods of preserving variants suffered from grave defects, and the growth of variants both in orthography and text continued unabated, the early guardians of the text felt the need of another procedure. This led to their selection of an archetypal manuscript of high antiquity and repute, which was accepted as basic. Its text was then collated with a few other ancient and accurate codices, from which the best readings were culled and noted on the margin of the archetype. That these reading are not corrections by the Masoretes, but variant readings, is clear on many grounds. Particularly significant is the evidence of the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Isaiah Scroll, both of which carry in their text as ordinary variants readings, which exist in our Qere. The significant testimony from the Masora itself and from Rabbinic sources in this regard are adduced and discussed.
Internal and external evidence demonstrates that the choice of an archetype and the collation of the manuscript variants from which the bulk of our Kethib-Qere readings are derived, took place during the Second Commonwealth (before 70 C.E.) when the Temple library existed and the religious center of Judaism in Jerusalem was intact.
That this significant achievement was much earlier than the generation of Rabbi 'Aqiva is clear on many grounds, many derived from Talmudic and patristic sources. This conclusion has now been strikingly validated by these Dead Sea discoveries, when their implications are properly drawn. As is well known, there are substantial orthographic and textual variants in the Isaiah Scroll, and in many of the fragments from the Qumran caves, which emanate from the Covenanters Sect in the last two pre-Christian centuries. On the other hand, the more recent discoveries in Wadi Murabba'at, which derive from a period two hundred years later and go back to a garrison of Jewish soldiers during the revolt of Bar Kokhva, the contemporary of Rabbi 'Aqiva, agree virtually completely with the Masoretic text.
Some recent scholars have argued that the difference proves that the fixing of the Masoretic text took place in the period of Rabbi 'Aqiva. This must be pronounced an impossibility. It is inconceivable that soldiers engaged in a desperate struggle against tremendous odds would have the time or interest to wait for a new Biblical text which had just been created. On the contrary, the Biblical text that they would carry with them into the desolate Dead Sea country would naturally be one long familiar and established as sacred. Thus the evidence for the Masoretic text in the Wadi Murabba'at remains testifies to the fixing of this text at a substantially earlier period and thus agrees with the other considerations advanced, for a pre-'Aqivan date.
Obviously the fixing of an official text did not, ipso facto, eliminate various popular manuscripts that continued to circulate. The cost of writing an accurate manuscript or even of correcting an existing manuscript in accordance with the archetype or a copy of it, was undoubtedly high. It therefore follows that these popular "unofficial" manuscripts continued to be used and recopied time and again. These manuscripts generally contained a greater degree of plene spellings, as well as other variants. Most of these were, to be sure, the result of scribal errors in the recopying of manuscripts, but some were undoubtedly original readings that had not found their way into the archetype and the limited number of other scrolls collated with it by the official guardians of the text. The "vulgar" manuscripts were used even by scholars for their private reading. Principally, however, they would survive in circles that were far removed from the religious center in Jerusalem, either geographically or ideologically. This is true of the Samaritan Pentateuch and of the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint, which are frequently validated by the Biblical Scrolls in use among the Dead Sea Covenanters, who were bitterly hostile to the ruling religious party in Jerusalem.
The radically plene spelling in the Isaiah I Scroll and in the other documents of the Dead Sea sect, suggest one other highly important conclusion—had Masoretes not been active in the early pre-Christian centuries, the natural process of adding vowel-letters, which is abundantly attested in different forms both in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the medieval manuscripts, would have been carried to such extremes that the restoration of a simpler defectiva text, such as we possess today by medieval Masoretes, would have been impossible. Thus the plene Biblical manuscripts from the second century B.C. testify to the existence of early Masoretic labors, dedicated to preserving Sacred Writ against the intrusion of new elements, both orthographic and textual.
Beyond the assignment of this achievement to the Second Temple period, the choice of the archetype and the collation of variants can not be more precisely determined. Yet it seems likely that the rise of national sentiment after the Maccabean victories, following upon the Antiochian persecutions, which witnessed the wholesale destruction of Biblical manuscripts, served as a stimulus to this undertaking. The peaceful reign of Queen Salome Alexandra (76—67 B.C.) who halted the persecution of the Pharisees, offers a possible period for these early anonymous Masoretes, whose all-important labors created the text of Scripture that has served as the fountain-head both of Judaism and Christianity.