List of Large and Small Letters in the Bible
Masoretes
7th to 10th Century
Image
Engage with this Source
Creator Bio
Masoretes
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.
You may also like
Cairo Codex: Colophon
I, Moses Ben Asher, wrote this holy book of the Bible, dictated by myself, in accordance with the good hand of the Lord upon me [see Nehemiah 2:18], very clearly (Deuteronomy 27:8), in the province of…
Book of Word Pairs
The consonantal Hebrew text that is the basis for the Masoretic Bible was transmitted with some orthographic irregularities. The Book of Word Pairs (Sefer okhlah va-okhlah) is an independent Masoretic…
Fine Details of the Accents
This is a book on the fine details of the accents, composed by R. Aaron Ben Asher, from the place Ma‘aziah, which is called Tiberias, situated to the west of the Sea of Galilee. May God lay…
Epistle
I have seen that you have broken with the custom of [reciting] the Aramaic translation of the Torah in your synagogues, and in this, you have submitted to the ignorant among you, who claim they do not…
Book of the Principles of Hebrew Poetics
[ . . . ] The Muslims report that one of their learned men encountered a group of people who did not speak Arabic correctly, and it filled him with sadness, so he briefly…
Book of the Seventy Isolated Biblical Words
And I saw that there are some among the Hebrews who reject whatever is transmitted from the prophets by way of the unwritten precepts and laws, and similarly those who reject whatever they have heard…