Mysterious Texts

It’s the worst written sentence ever. Remember how you vowed a thing that you vowed to fulfill? And then you fulfilled— I want you to fulfill the vow that you vowed to fulfill.

Yeah. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of disinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. It’s a fun show we have planned for everybody today. Yeah, in part because we’re gonna— even if you’re familiar with the Bible, we’re going to be talking about things that you may not have ever heard of. And that’s kind of interesting.

I think so.

So we’re going to start off with a chapter and verse, but it ain’t a chapter and verse that, like, for the most part, for most of the people who are listening/watching this show, you’re not going to have it in your book. You can open, you can open your book, but you’re not going to find it.

You’re going to find a version of a lot of it.

Well, that’s true.

Not the whole thing. Yes.

So, so we’ll get to that.

Yeah.

And then, and that’s going to be, that’s Well, I’ll just say it’s 1 Esdras. So we’ll figure out what that is. And then we’re going to go and do a What’s That? It’s a what’s that that we have mentioned, that you have talked about briefly at various times on, you know, as we’ve done this show.

It comes up from time to time.

It’s the Masoretes. And so we’re gonna do the deep dive that we’ve needed to do to really understand who these people were and what they were up to.

Yep.

So let’s dive in with chapter and verse. Well, Dan, we said it, it’s 1 Esdras. Apparently there are multiple Esdrases.

Yeah.

But we’re just doing the first one. And as we said, it’s not in my Bible. So what is this thing? Where did it come from? Why are we talking about it?

So we generally find it in the Greek and Slavonic Orthodox traditions. It derives from the Septuagint, from the ancient Greek translation. And it’s basically a version of Ezra-Nehemiah that it’s a Greek translation and it’s a little expansive. It has a little bit extra in it. But if you have Ezra-Nehemiah, then you have access to something close to the majority of 1 Esdras. And now, and I think there’s a lot of fascinating things associated with the fact that this comes from the Septuagint. One, there are a lot of scholars who think it’s a translation from a Semitic language, from either Hebrew or Aramaic. So it could have been originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic before being translated into Greek. And it is only in those, the canons of those traditions that adhered more faithfully to the Septuagint, whereas the broader Catholic tradition kind of fell away from giving the Septuagint preferential treatment.

And, you know, once we got to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, then the, you know, the Apocrypha kind of became secondary. It’s not part of the Apocrypha. It is something distinct from that. But if we look in, like, Josephus, Josephus is one of the earliest references that we have to the notion of a Jewish canon, where he talks about there being a certain number of books. But Josephus also quotes from— when he talks about Ezra and Nehemiah, he seems to be quoting from 1 Esdras. Rather than from the Ezra-Nehemiah books, which suggests that maybe for Josephus, this was his canonical version of Ezra-Nehemiah.

So, when you say Ezra-Nehemiah, you’re saying the book of Ezra , the book of Nehemiah —.

Yes.

—Cover basically all the same ground, minus one little story, or cover, you know, as First Esdras. Is that right?

Yeah, more or less. Yeah. And there’s a slight change in order. There are a handful of verses that are moved up a little earlier in 1 Esdras in order to create kind of this poetic— I think a lot of scholars say there’s a chiasm, and chiasmus is this idea where you have like theme A, theme B, theme C, and then you’ve got your central theme, and then you go theme D, theme C, theme B.

This is the theory that they used to create the episodes of Seinfeld, is that right? A story and a B story, and then a C.

But then you go B and A, and there’s a parallelism. So it’s inverse parallelism. But anyway, and this became a thing decades ago in scholarship, where everybody’s like, “Ooh, chiasms all over the place.

But— Is it— Yeah, it’s— sorry, it doesn’t seem— it seems a little too coincidental that Esdras is so close to the word Ezra. Are they the same?

Yeah, it’s just the Greek transliteration.

Okay, so basically this is just Ezra.

Yeah, it’s better than Ezra. I’m kidding. It’s not better than Ezra. That’s the name of a band. Okay.

So is Ezra— are both these books in the Septuagint? Ezra and Esdras?

There may be manuscripts where they are, but no. And one of the titles for 1 Esdras is Greek Ezra. Oh, okay. Because it’s the Greek translation. Okay. It was probably composed somewhere around the 2nd century BCE, so it’s coming around the time that the Septuagint is being prepared anyway. But again, it’s certainly plausible that it was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. And then you do have a little bit, like, Ezra begins with the last 2 verses of 2 Chronicles chapter 36, so the very end of 2 Chronicles. The last 2 verses are the first 2 verses of the book of Ezra . But when we look at 1 Esdras, 1 Esdras, no, that’s not right. 1, Whoo, the dental trays are tripping me up. 1 Esdras, it’s the last 2 chapters of 2 Chronicles are the first chapter of 1 Esdras.

So it’s, I still, I’ve got to find a way around 1st Esdras, because I keep wanting to put a T on the end of it. So, we’ve got a slightly larger inclusion of kind of that introduction, and that has led to some people theorizing that maybe the books of Chronicles were a part of Ezra and Nehemiah, that it was one, all kept on one scroll or something like that. And so maybe when this was translated into Greek, they took a larger chunk of 2 Chronicles than the people who transmitted it in Hebrew. So that’s a possibility. But basically, we’re talking about the end of— we begin with the end of the reign of King Josiah, and we get the last king of Judah and the fall of Jerusalem, and then we get to Cyrus the Great, who— and if you weren’t aware of this, everybody out there, Cyrus the Great is called my Christ.

Oh. By God in Isaiah 45 . I was not aware of that. At least it’s my Messiah. The Hebrew of Isaiah 45:1 is “my Messiah.” Cyrus the Great, he’s explicitly referred to by name Cyrus and explicitly called his anointed. The Hebrew is “his anointed,” I think. Is it the Greek that says “my anointed”? Yes, the Greek has “kyrios ho theos to christo mou.” So that would be “my Christ.” God calls Cyrus “my Christ.” Persian king, this is the guy who conquered Babylon, the Babylonian Empire, 539 BCE. Took over— famously not a Hebrew. Yes. Yeah, I don’t know if his identity as non-Hebrew is the famous part of it, but he was definitely very famous and was definitely not an Israelite.

But yeah, this is kind of a, what is it, ex eventu prophecy, basically. Someone writing after this time period is looking back and having God go, “Yeah, the guy who conquered things, because that ended up being good for us, that was, you know, he was working for me,” is basically what we have there. And 1 Esdras is trying to get us into the period when there’s a return to Jerusalem, when they’re rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem in Nehemiah, when Ezra is restoring knowledge of the law of the Lord, and then we also have some rather xenophobic, ethnocentric divorces that are forced upon the folks when they get back there. Everyone who married foreign— all the men who married foreign women, they have to divorce them and then send them, send those women and the kids packing.

So that’s a problematic part of this. But as we were mentioning before we started the show, there’s this awesome story that gets added into 1 Esdras that is not a part of Ezra and Nehemiah. And this story begins at chapter 3, 1 Esdras chapter 3, where King Darius— now if we go look in the book of Daniel , King Darius is the one, Darius I, or the Great, is the one who conquers Babylon, and Cyrus only comes later. Which is not historical. But Darius had a great banquet for all who were under him, all who were born in his house, and all the nobles of Media and Persia. And the satraps and the generals and the governors were under him in the 127 satrapies from India to Ethiopia. They ate and drank, and when they were satisfied, they went away.

That is weird. Like, hey, let’s all three of us make a bet, and then that other guy has to give us the thing that we demand. Yeah. Meanwhile, from the room you hear, “Shut up, I’m trying to sleep.” Yeah, it does. I mean, the fact that, uh, it has the king waking again, maybe— I don’t know, it’s a weirdly told story. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Yeah, but it— all I could think of was Conan the Barbarian. What, what is best in life? Do you remember that scene from, from, uh, Conan the Barbarian?

I’m not convinced I’ve seen that all the way through. You’ve not? Oh.

You may not have stayed through to the end of the dialogue.

Well, and you know, if I’ve seen it, it was bits and pieces when it was on TV and I was a kid and it was like, you know, whatever.

I don’t know. It’s kind of this trope where you have this bizarre kind of very abstract open-ended question as part of, you know, a meeting or a dinner party or a feast or something like that. And here it’s just three bodyguards standing outside of the king’s chamber, negotiating the king’s good graces. But in Conan, somebody asks him, “What is best in life?” And he says, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.” Only in that probably at least partially fake Austrian accent. Yeah. That should have been gone a long time ago. But that’s what I think of when somebody’s like, “Let’s debate what word is strongest.” Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a weird question, but boy does it just take over the entire house of Darius by storm. Boy, do they— like, everybody’s into this question. So these three guys each write their word on a piece of paper and stick it under the pillow of the king. Yeah, sealed them up.

And then like, you haven’t experienced this. Anybody with kids out there has experienced being asleep and then sensing a presence or hearing the shuffling of little feet and opening your eyes and seeing a miniature human looming over you and just been like, “Ah!” Staring at you. Yeah, but I can imagine them being like, shh, just put it under the pillow, just go. And, um, just slide it, don’t lift the pillow, just slide it, slide it under.

I think what I was imagining is that Darius was still awake and like getting his warm milk, and they were just— and they just stuck it under there, uh, while he was gone, and then he came back. “What are you doing in here?” “Oh, sorry, nothing is under your pillow, so don’t worry about that at all.”

It’s called pillow talk, baby. And then they put it under the pillow and said, when the king wakes, they will give him the writing. And to the one whose statement the king and the three nobles of Persia judge to be wisest, the victory shall be given according to what is written.

Yeah. You’re going to see what this is all an etiology for at the end. But this is a very silly story, especially considering what the— I mean, these are three strong guys, right? This isn’t the three wisest guys in the kingdom coming together to have this competition. It’s just the three tough guys who are bodyguards. And the first guy writes that wine is the strongest. The second guy writes the king is— I like the second guy’s approach because it is the brown-noser approach and it seems it seems like that is a smart way to go. Like you’re never going to go wrong by flattering the king. Yeah.

Particularly in a situation where you have already dedicated the king’s resources to a prize he never agreed to. Right. Exactly. So we’re doing this.

It makes sense to say that. And the third one, now here’s what I was thinking. I thought we were building to a very obvious third thing. As I was reading this, I was pretty sure it was going to say God.

Yeah, it goes wine, king, God. That’s the, uh, you know that old children’s tale from the sea?

Everybody knows that one. Yeah, that, that old canard. Uh, anywho, no, it’s not God. It’s— first of all, the second guy, uh, gets two answers apparently. Don’t know why he gets two. Um, or the third guy rather. The third. So the third guy writes women are the strongest, but above all things, truth is the victor. Yeah. Which, why does he get two?

Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking of Gollum in The Hobbit going, his last guess is string or nothing. It’s like, wait a minute. Whoa. Do you know how last guess works? Because, but yeah. So yeah. And the women, I think it’s, I think it will be interesting to just look briefly at the women answer because It’s, you know, you are kind of like, oh, but also it’s kind of pedestalizing and also patronizing or patronizing. Excuse me.

Do you say patronizing if you want to?

I distinguish patronizing from patronizing as patronizing is going into a business and patronizing is the other thing. Now, okay. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s just how I keep them straight in my mind. I like it. Unless when I— except when I misspeak.

It’s like how we separate want from won’t, and I won’t be hearing any problems with that. And I won’t be dignifying that with a response.

That’s right. And who is it then who rules them or has the mastery over them? Is it not women? Women gave birth to the king and every people that rules over sea and land, from women they came. And women brought up the very men who plant the vineyards from which comes wine. Women make men’s clothes. They bring men glory. Men cannot exist without women. If men gather gold and silver or any other beautiful thing and then see a woman lovely in appearance and beauty, they let all those things go and gape at her with open mouths, and with open mouths stare at her, and all prefer her to gold or silver or any other beautiful thing. A man—.

Call this the, uh, the James Brown argument. This is a man’s world.

A man leaves his own father who brought him up and his own region and clings to his wife. With his wife he ends his days and no thought of his father or his mother or his region. Therefore you must realize that women rule over you.

We should be clear that this is later. This is in chapter 4. And this is the— what happens is that they put— they tuck their answers under the pillow, and then the king wakes up and agrees to this whole endeavor and calls in the wisest people in, you know, the three wise men. Yeah, not, not those three wise men, but, uh, and then— and, and so they are doing the contest. The contest is on, and each of them has to explain their answer.

Now, now, funny enough, he calls these people in from across the entire empire, which would take months for everybody.

Well, no, they were already there, right?

They were already there for the banquet. Oh, they were at the banquet?

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were already hanging out.

They ate and drank and there’s— okay, you know what? I completely did not connect those two dots. Sometimes Dan gets it wrong, you guys. More than I’m happy to admit, but yeah, I definitely got it wrong there.

Um, so go ahead. So as long as the— yeah, as long as the wisest people in the— in all of the lands are gonna be around or hanging out, I might as well, uh, might as well call them in for this bodyguard, uh, contest.

And yes, so probably expected something different. The— like, the, the scholars, they’re, they’re like, hey, we need you to judge this bodyguard contest. And they’re probably like, uh, okay. And then they’re like, oh, they’re gonna be reading us their responses to the question, what word is strongest? I have much better things to do with my time, right? And oh gosh, this—.

But apparently they don’t. Now we’re getting to the dregs. So each of them— the first guy, uh, explains why he thinks wine is so strong because it makes everybody drunk and dumb. Yeah. And then the second guy explains why he thinks, uh, the king is stronger than everybody, blah blah blah. He does the brown-noser play. Yep. And then, uh, and then yeah, the third guy starts with his James Brown, uh, “This is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman or a girl.” And but then closes it out with his real answer, which is, uh, truth. Is that it?

Truth? Um, the king and the nobles looked at one another and he began to speak about truth.

So then he does it. Yeah, he, he says that truth is important. Okay. And everybody’s just blown away about truth.

Now, if we go back to the beginning of the speech about women, the third bodyguard is identified as Zerubbabel.

Right. I saw that, and it does feel like it’s like a big reveal, but I don’t know who Zerubbabel is. Who’s Zerubbabel?

Zerubbabel was a governor in Jerusalem, sometimes the Second Temple, which is rebuilt as a result of what’s going on in this story—at least according to this narrative—it’s referred to as Zerubbabel’s Temple.

Oh, oh, and he started as a lowly bodyguard? That’s so great.

Good for him. He worked his way up. It was wine, king, women, Zerubbabel’s Temple.

It’s that age-old thing where it’s like, you know, you start out as a waiter and eventually you’re CEO of the company or whatever.

Well, I think most of the time you just get stuck as the manager of the restaurant and then spend the rest of your life trying to get out of that job. Yeah, exactly. But now it says that they’re going to give, you know, the reward is that they will give rich gifts and great honors of victory. But then Zerubbabel’s reward in verse 22 of chapter 4, the king says, “What do you want?” And does he—he does not seem to say “up to half of my kingdom,” which seems to be how these stories—he says more than that.

He says, “Ask what you wish even beyond what is written, and we will give it to you.” Yeah, so it is kind of that even half of my kingdom.

Yeah, it’s the same idea. It’s like they’re offering what no king has ever offered anyone.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly.

And then we get to the part that kind of throws you off a little bit. “Then he said to the king, ‘Remember the vow that you made on the day when you became king to build Jerusalem and send back all the vessels that were taken from Jerusalem,’ which Cyrus set apart when he began to destroy Babylon and vowed to send them back. You also vowed to build the temple. And now, O Lord the King, this is what I ask and request of you, and this befits your greatness. I pray therefore that you fulfill the vow whose fulfillment you vowed to the King of Heaven with your own lips.” It’s the worst written sentence ever.

Remember how you vowed a thing that you vowed to fulfill the vow, and then you fulfilled—I want you to fulfill the vow that you vowed to fulfill. Yeah. Anyway, there you go. Yeah.

And this is—now it wasn’t Darius who would’ve sent people back and authorized the rebuilding of the temple. It’s supposed to be Cyrus. There’s a little bit of a historical “how’s your father” going on here. Okay. So at least as far as we know. But it says, “Then King Darius got up and kissed him.” Probably closed mouth. We’re not sure, but—

We can’t tell. Look, we don’t know what the customs of the time were. And he is the king. It’s good to be the king.

Yeah. And wrote letters for him to all the treasurers and governors and generals and satraps that they should give safe conduct to him and to all who are going up with him to build Jerusalem. And, you know, then we get Zerubbabel offers up a prayer. Lifted up his face to heaven toward Jerusalem. And this is something you see in Daniel as well. In what direction does Daniel pray? Daniel prays toward Jerusalem. Okay. And during the whole nobody’s allowed to pray thing, which is indicative of this understanding that God is in Jerusalem or the Jerusalem Temple, or at least God is, if not confined, at least home base is the Jerusalem Temple and the land.

Yeah, I guess we have talked about that being a feature, a function of that time, of how they thought of their god in that time, which was that it was a regional god. It was a god of that area, of that place, and other gods were the gods of other places. So yeah, it makes sense that you would aim your prayer at your god and just sort of shoot it back. I wonder if that’s what the Muslim tradition of praying toward Mecca is—

It’s definitely related. Related to, yeah. Yeah, the intuition is definitely there, but it obviously conflicts with notions that God is everywhere and is not confined to a point in space and time. And so you have to kind of re-rationalize things when the original rationale becomes obsolete. Yeah. But he praises God, “From you comes the victory, from you comes wisdom, and yours is the glory. I am your servant. Blessed are you who have given me wisdom. I give you thanks, O Lord of our ancestors.” So, took the letters, went to Babylon, told this to all his kindred, and they praised the God of their ancestors because he had given them freedom and permission to go up and build Jerusalem and the temple that is called by his name. And they feasted with music and rejoicing for 7 days. And 7 days, we should probably do an episode at some point where we talk about the number 7.

And I will have to be prohibited from quoting “There’s Something About Mary” in that episode. But, uh, because the 7-day week is almost certainly a result of the time spent as exiles, exiles in Babylon. Oh, interesting. So yeah, I think I’d have to do a little prep to get a little more of the background of that, but I think that would be an interesting episode.

Yeah, that would be interesting. And it ties into other sort of what people would say is numerology in and amongst the various writings.

Yeah, we got— you got 3, you got 7, you got 12, you got 40, you got 70. There are a lot of significant numbers. And once we get to chapter 5, the first 6 verses of chapter 5 are supposed to be unique to 1 Esdras. And it talks about the ancestral houses, the priests and descendants of Phinehas, son of Aaron, and Joshua and the house of David and so on. And then I think verse 7 is where it starts back up with the genealogical list that we find in Ezra and Nehemiah, which is just, yeah, it just goes on with so-and-so and so-and-so, the descendants of such-and-such’s servants and the descendants of such-and-such. So most of the rest of 1 Esdras is parallel to what we find in Ezra and Nehemiah. But it is— this is the only— Ezra and Nehemiah, if I recall, I could be wrong, but I think it’s the only historical narrative in the Bible that actually addresses what’s going on in the Persian time period.

Esther is set in that time period, but I think this is the only one that discusses kind of broader events that are going on, particularly related to the return to Jerusalem and the building of the temple. So 1 Esdras is a retelling or a paraphrase or some kind of parallel account of this from 2 Esdras— excuse me, Ezra-Nehemiah. All right. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, if you’re Orthodox or if you’re part of one of the Slavonic traditions, then you’re probably more familiar with this than either of us is.

But, well, I just think it’s interesting that, like, I guess, I guess if you’re one of, part of one of those traditions, you have to read a lot of the stories multiple times. If you’re going to read the same thing, if you’re going to read the whole book, other than the story that we just told of the, you know, the bet between the 3 bodyguards, you’re just going to have to read Ezra and Nehemiah twice, apparently. So there you go. There’s a lot of that in the Bible, a lot of retreading of ground.

But I think it’s interesting when you get into some of these, this, the stories that are written in this time period, there are so many parallels, like the court tale motif is so much of the apocryphal texts. And, you know, 1 Esdras, but also Esther and Daniel, excuse me, I called him Dan, Daniel. We’re close, so we can use nicknames like that. But yeah, the whole court tale is such a standardized motif from the stories of this time period that you can all— you can basically know what’s happening before it happens. But yeah, it’s a fascinating little story, an interesting piece of the Bible that a lot of people aren’t aware of.

Well, that is crazy and interesting and fascinating. But we have more interesting and fascinating coming up. So let’s dive into what’s that. Alright, so what’s that? It’s the Masoretes slash the Masoretic Text. That’s— those are phrases. The Masoretic Text is a phrase that you have used many times. Yes. And so, let’s talk about who and what we’re getting into here.

Yeah. The Masoretes are a group of scribes that were— they basically produced the textual tradition that is considered most authoritative by the most Jewish folks, at least in terms of those who are approaching the Hebrew Bible from a Jewish devotional point of view, as well as most scholars. So, the Masoretic Text is considered the best single manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Now, the Masoretic Text actually refers to a family of manuscripts, not just a single manuscript, but the best representative, the oldest complete representative of the Masoretic tradition is the Leningrad Codex, which dates to like 1008 CE.

Okay, and so this is well into the Common Era. We are well past the writing, like centuries after the writing of any of these, the original composition of any of these texts. Yeah.

And the Masoretic tradition, the Masoretic group, is usually dated to between around 500 CE and around 1000 CE. So the Leningrad Codex would be like the apex, the culmination of all of their work. But they started in the middle of the first millennium CE. Okay. And who were they?

You said they’re scribes, but like, are they— was this just a tradition? Was it like a monastic group? Or like, why are they called the Masoretes? It’s because it sounds like a group. It sounds like an ethnic group or something.

So it’s dominated by some specific families, but located either in Tiberias, which is a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, or a couple of cities in modern-day Iraq along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So it’s, there’s one family within the Masoretes. So it’s not, I don’t think you can call it an ethnic group, but it’s more of like a tradition. But there are certainly representative families, just like folks who are— yeah, there are just— there are prominent families.

You were about to go to The Godfather, weren’t you? No, not quite. The Five Families.

Well, I was trying to decide between that or the Five Boroughs from a Kings of New York kind of approach.

Oh, sure, sure.

Or talking about Mormon wards that have like the governing families. But Aaron ben Moses ben Asher is considered one of the most prominent representatives of this school. And I think he dies before we get to 1000 CE, so like between 950 and 1000 CE. But then there was also another named ben Naftali. And there are, I think there are slightly different textual traditions associated with these two different individuals who lived roughly contemporaneously. But yeah, this is something that’s spread out. But they’re basically— these people are all united in their desire to transmit the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible faithfully. But also, they do two big things among the many things that they did. They developed a system of vocalization, So, if you know about Hebrew, you probably know that there are no vowels that are written.

The consonants that are written down do not have vowels. But as it began to be less and less commonly spoken, natively spoken as a living language, it began to need some supplemental help so that you could understand precisely what was going on, what vowels were intended to be spoken.

I guess I hadn’t realized that it was— that the spoken language was falling so far out of use. Did—.

The degree to which that’s true is kind of debated, but I think most folks would say by the time of the turn of the era, so like the 1st century CE, people probably spoke Aramaic more than they spoke Hebrew. There are certainly scholars who will argue that Hebrew was still a thriving, living language in this time period. And we have Mishnaic Hebrew, and we have, like, we have poetry from the medieval period written in Hebrew. The degree to which it became a dead language is debated. Certainly there were people who were speaking it. It might have become more of a liturgical language, somewhat like ecclesiastical Latin or something like that. It— I’m not sure. I’m sure there are people who have stronger feelings than I do about it, but I think it is It is still a little hazy, but—.

So is modern Hebrew that is spoken in Israel, is that a revival of a language?

That is a revival. In fact, it’s considered the most successful revived language of all time.

I did not realize that. I don’t know why that had escaped me, but that’s really fascinating.

The Jewish diaspora where people were spread all over the place and you had a lot of Jewish folks who were speaking Russian and you had a lot of Jewish folks who were speaking German and you had a lot of Jewish folks who were speaking Portuguese and you had a lot of folks who were speaking Yiddish, which is related to German. And when there is a desire to recreate a Jewish homeland, it was like, hey, if we’re going to be a single people and have a homeland, then we need to be speaking a single language. So Zionism sits at the root of the development of modern Hebrew to some degree. And that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the revival of the Hebrew language, but the rationale was a single people should be identifiable by a single language. And so there was an intentional effort to revive Hebrew.

Well, and as you say, it was it was probably carried along at least liturgically in most of these traditions. Yeah, I—.

Literarily, uh, definitely literarily to some degree, definitely, uh, liturgically to some degree. The degree to which, you know, mothers would speak to their children in Hebrew, um, I’m sure that was going on, but I don’t know how prominent it was. But it was a slightly, um, you know, all languages evolved, so Hebrew is evolving over this time period. However, when we go back to prior to the Masoretes, there, the first 5 centuries of the Common Era, there were a few different attempts to try to create a system of vowel notations.

There’s one that’s kind of a diagonal line with a little smaller line going off of it, and then the series of dots. There’s a Palestinian system that also develops, but it’s really the Tiberian system. So the Tiberias, Tiberian system would have been the system developed by the Masoretes in Tiberias, that city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. And that’s the one that dominates and ultimately becomes what is considered authoritative these days for most people who are engaging with the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. And so that’s one of the main contributions of the Masoretes, just the preservation of the text is probably the most significant. But the development of and perfection of, as some people like to say, the vocalization tradition is probably the next largest contribution. But then they did an awful lot of analysis of the text. And there’s a saying that anything that could be counted was counted.

So, when you look in a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, there are a couple of different collections of notes that are referred to as the Masorah. You have the Masorah Parva and the Masorah Magna, a large Masorah and small Masorah. And these are basically just annotations talking about how frequently things are occurring. So they counted up every word, every word form. And so you’ll occasionally see a little letter in the margin of the Leningrad Codex, and that indicates this exact form of this word only occurs once. This is the only occurrence of that exact form of the word. They also introduce the ketiv and qere system, which is basically like, they’re doing their best to try not to alter the consonants of the manuscripts at all, but there are times when it’s very clear that the consonants are incorrect, or they don’t want people to read out loud what the consonants say because it could be a vulgarity or it could be considered blasphemous or something like that.

And so you have in many cases, or it could be that the vowels that they’ve added, they would prefer you not pronounce those vowels. They think it was probably originally something else. So they’re trying to transmit the tradition as they received it, but they are adding notes where they think, like, “Hey, we actually think it probably was intended to be pronounced this way.” And so the qere, which would mean “read” or “said out loud,” that is sometimes annotated in the margins. And so the reader knows, okay, the ketiv means “written,” so that is what is in the text, and then the qere would be where they suggest you pronounce it a different way. Huh. And then you have qere perpetuum, which are the things that you always pronounce differently. So the divine name, for instance, you would never pronounce. You would always say, I, I, Adonai is one substitution, Hashem is another substitution. And then there, you know, like the name Jerusalem is, there’s a, it’s pronounced slightly different from how it’s spelled in the consonantal text.

So they did that, and then they also contributed a system of cantillation marks, which was intended to aid the reading, the liturgical reading, which was more of a— I don’t want to say a song, but the intent was to read it with specific intonations and, you know, a cantor was supposed to read it a specific way. So, it was a little more sing-songy. You’re supposed to accent things a certain way. You’re supposed to keep certain groups of words together and separate other groups of words. So, you also have the addition of these cantillation marks. So, if you look at a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, or if you look at the Leningrad Codex, it can kind of be a mess because you’ve got— you have all these consonants, but then you’ve got a system of vocalization written around the consonants, and then you have cantillation marks written around the consonants, and then a lot of critical editions will also have footnote markers to tell you about, like, all variant readings and stuff.

So you’ve got the text, you’ll have one set of marginal notes, you’ll have another set of marginal notes beneath the text, and then you’ll have the critical apparatus, which is like the modern scholarly notes, and then the text is just, you know, a bunch of different annotation systems. So it can be a little overwhelming.

This is what happens when you get a whole bunch of very obsessive people, like, obsessing over a thing for 500 years. You’re just— you’re gonna get every note possible in the world.

And there are— yeah, we’ve got other manuscripts that come from the Masoretes that are earlier. For instance, there is a codex that is probably about 100 years earlier than the Leningrad Codex called the Aleppo Codex, but it’s not complete. It’s missing a large chunk of the Pentateuch. Some of it was lost in a fire, and every now and then a chunk of the Aleppo Codex will, you know, somebody will be like, “I found it in my attic.” Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And, you know, close comparison shows that of the hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands of vowels, like it differs only in like the use of a metheg, which is kind of one of these cantillation marks. Oh, okay. And so like the differences are so, so minimal. Oh, wow. Like people talk about how well the manuscripts show the Bible has been preserved. The Masoretes, like, if we want to talk about people who were very clearly very, very committed to their craft, the Masoretes, I think, stand head and shoulders above any other known scribal communities.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And, you know, one of the things that we’ve talked about when it comes to the Masoretic Text is just that you know, you mentioned that they invented the system for writing out vowels, which becomes really important. Did they make— they must have had to make interpretive calls. Oh yeah. Because, you know, we’ve talked about how many words you change the vowel, you change the meaning. I mean, that’s true in all languages. You know, if you— a cat versus a kit versus a cot, those are different things. But I mean, that could have huge implications theologically and sort of interpretively in terms of like, you know, they— so yeah, I guess my question is just how much of it was them just deciding which was the right vowel, or how much was traditionally handed to them, or, you know, I think the reading tradition would have been fairly firmly in place.

So I think an awful lot of it was them just copying down the tradition as they received it. No doubt there would have been fuzzy edges to that, and no doubt there would have been controversial passages. But we can see that when we look at the Septuagint, the Septuagint helps us determine how they would have pronounced things based on how things were translated, as well as a lot of stuff in the Septuagint is transliterated. If there was a Hebrew word that they thought was a name, or they just didn’t understand, they would transliterate it, and that would help us see how they were pronouncing it. And there is an awful lot of correspondence between the Septuagint, which is coming from 1,000 years before the Leningrad Codex. Right. There’s an awful lot of correspondence between the two. Now, there are divergences as well. And so, one of the fascinating things to do in the biblical Hebrew Bible scholarship is to look at those differences and try to figure out what’s going on in the reading traditions.

When did they change? Why did they change? And try to reconstruct whose reading is likely more original. And there are a lot of scholars who would argue that when you look at all the differences between how the Septuagint translators are reading the text and how the Masoretes are vocalizing the text, while there is an awful lot of correspondence, uh, where there are differences, I think a lot of scholars would say the Masoretes are probably correct more frequently than the Septuagint is correct. Now that’s just with vocalization, because when it comes to what the consonants were there, there are a lot of differences there as well. One of the things I find hilarious is when apologists get up and say that, you know, we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll and, you know, it blew scholars away, they were just so shocked that it matched so closely the Masoretic Text. It’s like, the Great Isaiah Scroll is not even the best transmitted book of Isaiah among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Like, there are other manuscripts of Isaiah that are far more faithful to what we find in the Masoretic Text. But these apologists never talk about, like, Jeremiah, because we have multiple different manuscripts of Jeremiah as well. They’re very fragmentary, they’re very small, but some of them show that the Septuagint reading of Jeremiah, which is 1/6 shorter than the book of Jeremiah in the Masoretic Text is preserved in some of these Hebrew manuscripts, which suggests to a lot of scholars that the Septuagint version of Jeremiah was earlier than what we now have in the Masoretic Text, that the Masoretic Text reading is later, secondary.

So the Masoretes weren’t sort of a clerical class. They were meant to be just sort of scribes trying diligently to transmit the old texts rather than rabbis who were who were there to interpret, or there to—

That’s right. It is definitely more scholarly a community than ecclesiastical. Okay. But certainly there’s kind of—it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, I think, because you would have certainly had people with authority among the Masoretes as well. And the scribe scholars would have been considered to have their own kind of authority that was not quite the same as ecclesiastical authority. And there are debates. There are some folks who think that the Masoretes were Karaites, which is kind of a minority branch of Judaism that is looked down upon by some other groups within Judaism. And there are a lot of people who say no, no way on earth that they were Karaites. So, we don’t know exactly their relationship to centralized authority and that kind of thing, but there are different possibilities.

But yeah, the Masoretes, when we refer to the Masoretes, generally, it’s referring to a group that is united by their scholarship and their scribal scribal school, scribal training, scribal tradition, more so than any kind of liturgical or ecclesiastical authority.

All right. Well, there you go. Now we know what we’re talking about when you start talking about the Masoretic Text versus the Septuagint versus whatever. I think that’ll be a good primer we can we can point people to this, to this episode when they’re like, what are you talking about? Just go back and watch that one. Yeah. Well, if you would like to become one of our favorite types of people and give us a little bit of money for what we do, we would love to have you over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode of the show, as well as you can get the patrons-only content that we do every week, the after-party. It’s a lot of fun, and we answer your questions over there. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer, and thanks to all y’all for tuning in. We’ll talk to you again next time.

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