Holy Scriptures According To the Masoretic Text

The Masoretic text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Tanakh for Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text is widely used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles, and in recent years (since 1943), for some versions of Catholic Bibles in terms of translation, but not of canon. The Masoretic Text was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries CE. Though the consonants differ little from the text generally accepted in the early 2nd century (and also differ little from some Qumran texts that are even older), it has numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to the manuscripts of the Septuagint, a Greek translation (about 100 years older than the MT made in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE) of the Hebrew Scriptures that was in popular use in Egypt and Israel (and was used in the quotations in the New Testament, especially by Paul the Apostle). The Hebrew word mesorah ( , alt. ) refers to the transmission of a tradition. In a very broad sense it can refer to the entire chain of Jewish tradition. This Jewish tradition is claimed (by Orthodox Judaism) to be unchanged and infallible. The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century CE.