This is an Old Testament text, established in the eighthand ninth centuries A.D. by Jewish scholars.¹

The scribes, known as Masoretes, tried to preserve themeaning of the Scriptures. Considering the effective system of vowel marksdeveloped by a small Jewish sect in Babylon about A.D. 500, a Masoreticfamily named ben Asher produced a better system of vowel markings in theninth and tenth centuries A.D. The ben Asher text comes to us in several forms, includingCodex C, Codex P, and Codex A.

In 1524, Jacob ben Hayyim published a printed text of the Hebrew Old Testament,using manuscripts that he had been copied from the ben Asher manuscripts. Because this was thefirst printed edition of the Hebrew Old Testament, it became a standard for printed Bibles.Gerhard Kittel's Biblica Hebraica, perhaps the best known Hebrew Old Testament of the twentiethcentury, listed the variations of the ben Hayyim text in its footnotes and did not include themin the text.²

I have been advised also that the ben Chayyim text was used for both Kittel'seditions of 1906 and 1912 and that the ben Asher text was adopted by Kittel for his thirdedition of Biblia Hebraica in 1937.

1. New Jerusalem Bible, 1985. Foreword.
2. The Bible Almanac. Nelson, 1980. Pages 70, 71.