THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
strange and yet correct punctuation. The greater mass of notes which the Masoretes added to the text relate to these matters. Besides some 3. Codices, other Masoretic manuscripts of the Bible which are quoted in the Masoretic notes of the codices or in the writings of the rabbis as authoritative, such as the codex Hilleli, the Jericho-Pentateuch, and others, two codices were especially famous as model codices of the Old Testament, the codex of Naphtali (Moses ben David ben Naphtali) and the codex of Asher (Aaron ben Moses ben Asher), both from the first half of the tenth century (Aaron lived at Tiberias, Moses in Babylon; but the latter can not be regarded as a representative of the " Babylonian " text-tradition.) They were once much examined by scholars; many of their variants are noted in the Masoretic Bible-manuscripts; a list of 864 (better 867) variants, which refer almost exclusively to vowels and accents, has been published after Jacob ben Hayyim in Bomberg's and the other Rabbinic Bibles, as well as in the sixth volume of the London Polyglot; but these variants are neither correct nor complete. On the codex of Asher finally rests the whole Masoretic text of the Occidentals; of the variant readings comparatively few were received into it.
As the older scribes had already shown extraordinary solicitude for the preservation of the text and its correct reading by counting its sections, verses, words, letters, and by noting where and how often and when certain words, letters, or anomalies occur in the Bible, which verse is the longest and which the shortest, and like minutiae, the Masoretes of course continued this work, wrote it down, and preserved it in manuscripts.
The punctuation of the text as developed by the M^-^-etes proved itself so useful and met so well an essential need of those later times that it soon went over into manuscripts and, with the exception of synagogue-manuscripts, almost none were written which did not contain either the pointed text alone or the pointed beside the unpointed. The other Masoretic material was written either beside and below the text of the Biblical books on the margins and at the close of the same, or in separate masorahcollections (see Masorah).
3. The Postmasoretic Period: After the completion of the Masoretic textual work and the collection of the notes having reference to it, no essential change was made in the text; consequently this period is the time of the faithful preservation, multiplication, and circulation of the Masoretic text. An essential innovation was the introduction of the now customary division into chapters, which was invented by
Chanter- Stephen Langton at the beginning of
Division. *ne thirteenth century, and applied to the Vulgate. Isaac ben Nathan adopted it for his Hebrew concordance (1437-38, published 1523), on which occasion the verses of the chapters were also numbered. The chapterdivision was first applied to the Hebrew in the second edition of Bomberg's Bible, 1521; the numbering of verses was first adopted for the Sabionetta Pentateuch, 1557, and that of the whole
Bible in Athias's edition of 1661 (see below, III, §§ 1-2).
Another feature of this period is that a sufficient number of manuscripts is preserved to give an immediate knowledge of the text. The Hebrew Bible-manuscripts may be divided into two classes, the public or sacred and the private or common. The first were synagogue-rolls, and have been prepared so carefully 2. OldTes- ancj watched so closely that the tame intrusion of variants and mistakes
scripts was hardly possible. But they contain only the Pentateuch or the Pentateuch with the five Megilloth or "Rolls" (i.e., Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), and the haphtaroth (see above, 2, § 1) in the text of the Masoretes without their additions. These manuscripts are, for the most part, of recent origin, although antique in form, being written on leather or parchment. The private manuscripts are written on the same material, and also upon paper in book form, with the Masoretic additions more or less complete. It is often difficult, indeed impossible, to determine the date and country of these manuscripts. But none of those now known are really very old. The oldest authentic date is 916 a.d. for the codex containing the prophets with Babylonian punctuation, and 1009 a.d. for an entire Hebrew Bible, both of which belong to the Firkowitsch collection in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg. According to the most recent investigation the MS. orient. 4445 in the British Museum (containing Gen. xxv, 20-Deut. i, 33) may be a little older. As a rule the oldest manuscripts are the more accurate. The number of errors that crept in, especially in private manuscripts, which were prepared without any official c~ezdgb„t, awakened solicitude and led to welldirected efforts to get a pure text by means of collating good Masorah-manuscripts (cf. B. Kennicott, Dissertatio generalis, Oxford, 1780, 1-1 vi; J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitung, Leipsic, 1803, 136b). In this line the labors of Mei'r ha-Levi of Toledo (d. 1244) in his work on the Pentateuch called "The Masorah, the Hedge of the Law" (Florence, 1750; Berlin, 1761) are celebrated.
The art of printing opened a way of escape from copyists' errors, and it was taken very early. The Psalter was printed first, at Bologna in 1477 [on the earlier prints, cf. B. Pick, History of the Printed Editions of the Old Testament, in Hebraica, ix (1892- 1893), 47-116], the first complete BibPe at Soncino _ T in 1488; Gerson's edition (the edition
Printed which Luther used for his translation) Text. followed (Brescia, 1494). Substantially the same text is contained in the first edition of Bomberg's Rabbinic Bible (1517; see Bibles, Rabbinic), also in the editions of Robert Stephens (1539 sqq.) and of Sebastian Munster. The second independent edition derived from manuscripts is that in the Complutensian Polyglot (1514-17; see Bibles, Polyglot, I). The text has vowels but no accents. The third important recension is contained in the Biblia Rabbinica Bombergiana, ed. II., cura R. Jacob ben Chajim (Venice, 1525-26); it is edited according to the