No official version existed at the time of Our Lord.

As is evident from the account given elsewhere of the Sacred Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible was a thing of gradual formation. That many of the original documents which were used in its formation were in the cuneiform script is very probable. Whether portions of the Bible itself were ever written in cuneiform is another question, but it is not impossible. It is certain, however, that anterior to the present Hebrew characters there were others which we find still in inscriptions and on coins, and which are known as the archaic Hebrew characters. When the LXX (Septuagint) version was made the Hebrew copies which the translators used were, at least in parts, in these old Hebrew characters. About the time of the Restoration, 538 B.C., the present square characters were gradually introduced. As the Rabbinic tradition has it "Of old the Law was given to Israel in Hebrew letters, and in the Holy tongue; but it was given again in the days of Esdras in Assyrian letters and in the Aramaic tongue." These words enshrine a tradition that Esdras brought from Babylonia the square characters with which we are familiar in our printed Hebrew Bibles.

Subsequent to the introduction of the square characters, we have to distinguish various stages in the formation of the present Hebrew Bible. Anterior to the formation of the LXX we find few traces of any editing of the Hebrew Bible, though the Pentateuch was divided into five Books, as also the Psalter. With the arrival of the Greek translations a great change came over the Hebrews. The translation had thrown the Sacred Books open to the public, and criticism soon made itself felt. This was resented, and the fact of its having been translated, though originally welcomed and its anniversary kept as a public feast, was later bewailed, and the feast changed into a fast. From two references in the New Testament, it is clear that the division into sections, known by the names presumably of the persons or events described in them, were already in use; cf. Mark 12:26 and Romans 11:2. No official text, however, seems to have existed at the time of Our Lord. This is clear from the divergences of the LXX, from the text given in the Targums, from the Syriac versions, and from the free quotations in the New Testament.

At the close of the first century A.D. a Council was held by the Rabbis at Jamnia, in which the Canon was settled [1] and the consonantal text of the Bible fixed, for it must be remembered that the vowels form no part of the Bible, and do not exist in Semitic languages generally. From this Council date the labors of the Sopherim or Scribes. To them we owe the separation of the words for hitherto Hebrew MSS. had been in one continuous script, also the forms of the letters at the end of words, the abolition of abbreviations in the text, the determination of the pronunciation of certain doubtful words, the removal of superfluous particles, also of certain indelicate expressions and seeming blasphemies. To them, too, we owe the "Q'eri" or "reading" of certain passages, as opposed to the "K'ethibh" or "written" text. To these Scribes are also due the "Extraordinary points," e.g. in Genesis 18:9; the "inverted nuns," e.g. Numbers 10:35-36; and above all, the "Tiqqun Sopherim" or "Changes of the Scribes," viz., passages which they agreed to read differently for dogmatic reasons, e.g. Genesis 18:22, Zechariah 2:12.

To the Scribes or Sopherini succeeded the Massoretes, or preservers of tradition. They labored to preserve what the Scribes had bequeathed to them. This they did by inventing the cumbersome but marvellous system of vowels by the aid of which the pronunciation of each word was preserved for ever. To them we owe the accents, the "daghesh," the present order of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bibles, the arrangement of the "Megilloth," etc.

The oldest MS. of the Hebrew Bible is apparently a MS. of the Prophets preserved at Cairo, and dating from A.D. 895. After this we have the famous St. Petersburg MS. of A.D. 916; both of these MSS. are peculiar in that they have the superlinear instead of the usual sublinear system of vocalisation.

The Psalter was the first portion of the Hebrew Bible printed, viz. in 1477 at Bologna; the Law appeared in 1482; and the whole Bible in 1488 at Soncino, and again in 1491-2 at Naples. In the Complutensian Polyglot of 1514, an independent Hebrew, text was given. In 1524, Jacob ben Chayyim published another independent Hebrew text; from an admixture of the three foregoing our present printed Hebrew Bibles are formed.


by
Very Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., S.T.M.
Doctor in Sacred Scripture,
Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and
late Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the Collegio Angelico, Rome.


VB Note: [1] The so-called "council" in Jamnia (or Jabneh) at the end of the first century was not an "official" council with binding authority to make such a decision:

"After the fall of Jerusalem (A.D.70), an assembly of religious teachers was established at Jabneh; this body was regarded as to some extent replacing the Sanhedrin, though it did not possess the same representative character or national authority. It appears that one of the subjects discussed among the rabbis was the status of certain biblical books (e.g. Eccles. and Song of Solomon) whose canonicity was still open to question in the 1st century A.D. The suggestion that a particular synod of Jabneh, held c. 100 A.D., finally settling the limits of the Old Testament canon, was made by H. E. Ryle; though it has had a wide currency, there is no evidence to substantiate it" (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingston, Oxford Univ. Press, p. 861).

Furthermore, no books are known to have been excluded at Jamnia. In fact, Sirach, which was used by Jews after the Jabneh period, was eventually excluded from the official Hebrew Bible (cf. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, Prentice-Hall, 1968, vol. II, p. 522).