The Hebrew Bible, or “Tanakh” (for “Torah,” “Nevi’im” = Prophets, and KHetuvim = Writings), is the sacred foundation of all subsequent Jewish traditions, understood to be divinely revealed or inspired. As an expression of  God’s will, it was an essential part of every Jewish community’s library. As an expression of God’s will, it was also essential that its precise form was carefully preserved. 

To protect the biblical text against corruption, scholars created a system, called the Masorah (“tradition”), which identified relatively rare forms of words in the Tanakh and drew attention to them in marginal notes. By forcing attention to the minute details of the biblical text, the Masorah (nearly) froze the text into a single, canonical form. 

This beautiful Yemenite Tanakh is written in a typical Yemenite hand and surrounded by Masoretic notes. It contains various decorative markers, including decorative frames containing notes between biblical books. On this page, you see the frame between Genesis and Exodus, which contains the Masoretic enumeration of such things as the number of verses in Genesis.