Damascus Pentateuch with Masorah

The Masoretes were a group of scholars who developed the system of the Masorah (“tradition”), after which they are named. Aside from a few names from the later generations, especially from the Ben Asher family, we know very little about the Masoretes. They seem to have begun their work in the sixth century, and the last known member of the Ben Asher family, Aaron, probably lived around the beginning of the tenth century.

The Masorah (tradition), narrowly construed, refers to notes transmitted in the margins of the written volumes of the Hebrew Bible that are intended to preserve the integrity of the biblical text. The text of the Bible, consisting of only consonants, is thought to have been standardized around 100 CE. The earliest definitive evidence of Jewish use of the codex format (a book with pages as opposed to a scroll), which allowed more room for marginal notes, comes from the early eighth century. Of the three main Masorah traditions—Tiberian, Palestinian, and Babylonian—the Tiberian eventually became the standard. The versions considered most reliable were collected and preserved by the Ben Asher family. The Masorah appears in several early Bibles, such as the Damascus Pentateuch, the Aleppo Codex,  the London Codex, the Cairo Codex, and the Leningrad Codex. Only the Leningrad Codex covers the text of the entire Hebrew Bible. In later centuries, while the Masorah was no longer integral to the transmission of the text, it was still copied into many biblical codices, often in more and more elaborate micrographic forms.

The term masorah can also refer to the combination of vowel and cantillation marks that guides the reading (both pronunciation and melody) of the text and that was also developed by the Masoretes. These marks are thought to have been systematized and written down sometime between 600 and 750 CE. Vowels are never mentioned in the Talmud. Again, there were three systems: the Tiberian (the system in use today, with vowels and marks written mostly below the consonants); the Palestinian (similar to the Tiberian, except that the tsere and segol were interchangeable, as were the pataḥ and kamats , and all the vowels were written above the consonants); and the Babylonian (with only six—not seven—vowels, also written above the consonants).