Bible

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. 

But there was a problem: in the age when the recording of words was restricted to manuscripts (=that which is “written by hand”), each copy of a work was different, as the human act of copying always introduced changes or errors into the text. People understood this, and it generally didn’t make much of a difference. But the biblical text, as divine revelation, was different, and changes or errors in the copying of this text would be catastrophic, changing, as they would, the meaning of God’s communication. To protect the biblical text against such changes, 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.