Page 258 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

238 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

Bereft of any original source from which to draw, and given that disputes
over meaning led each teacher to compile his own Oral Law, several
questions emerge: how valid is the Mishnah which has reached us today?
What divine authority does it have over all the other Mishnahs written by
now-forgotten rabbis? And who has the right to pronounce this as the de-
finitive Mishnah?

4. History if the Hebrew 'Text: The Masorah

The OT's Hebrew text is termed Masoretic because in its present form
it is based on the Masora, the textual tradition of theJewish scholars known
as the Masoretes.

The Masorah (Hebr. "tradition") refers to the systemof vowel signs,
accent markings, and marginal notes devised by early medievalJewish
scribes and scholarsand used in copyingthe text of the Hebrew Bible
in order to guard it from changes."?

i. Only Thirty-one Surviving Masoretic Texts of OT

The Masoretic text (MT) alludes to the end product, an endeavour in
which vowel and accent marks were introduced into the vowel-less, conson-
antal body of the Hebrew Bible in the early Middle Ages. The total number
of Hebrew Bibleswritten in Masoretic form (either complete or fragmentary)
is only thirty-one, dating from the late 9th century to 1100 C.E. 48 The symbol
I]!t designates the Masoretic text in both the Biblia Hebraica edited by Rudolf
Kittel (BHK) and the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).49 These constitute
the most critical editions of the OT and are highly revered; in fact they both
represent the text of the same manuscript, B 19A,in the Saltykov-Shchedrin
State Public Library of St. Petersburg, written in 1008 C.E. 50
One interesting feature of the Leningrad Codex, as it is known, is its
dating system. V. Lebedev states,

46 ibid, p. 954.
47 Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 500; emphasis added.
48 ibid, p. 50l.
49 Wi.irthwein, p. 10.
50 ibid, p. 10. A facsimile of this manuscript hasrecently beenpublished: TheLeningrad
Codex: A Facsimile Edition, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids,
Michigan, 1998.