The Massorah.

will find nothing better there , howcvei far you may push your search , than a long series of irregular lumber-rooms tapestried with Rabbinical cobwebs . No doubt the explorer of these strange recesses did excellent service in bringing to light some

curious and interesting objects , and gave fresh impulse to a neglected study . No doubt the tale was told with singular vivacity , and with a picturesqueness of grouping and colour which charmed and dazzled the imagination . But sober readers witheld their assent from the writer ' s

brilliant paradoxes , and it was manifest that the enthusiasm of a man who felt he was to the mass of men in the position of a discoverer had betrayed him into serious , if pardonable , exaggeration . The department of Jewish literature to which we are now about to introduce our

readers , is of a very different kind ; one that has been equally neglected , one that appeals far less powerfully to the imagination , but one in man } ' - respects of a greater importance , aud the investigation of which is likely to lead to more useful ancl

jiractical results . For the last IS years another distinguished scholar , Dr . Ginsburg , has been engaged in the laborious work of collecting the materials for a critical edition of the Old Testament Scriptures . It has long been a reproach to our Biblical scholarshi p , that so little has beeu done for the text of the Old

Testament . The labours of Kennicotfc , from which so much was expected , produced nothing but disappointment ; his collation of MSS ., not being based on any sound principles , was practically worthless . De Rossi ' s was very much better , but neither

he nor Kennicott troubled himself about the Massorah , without a thorough acquaintance with which no critical text can be constructed . It is to this point Dr . Ginsburg has more particularly directed his attention , and here we may expect some

valuable results ; for hitherto a curious misapprehension has attached to what is familiarly known as the Massoretic text . What is the Massorah 1 The word Massorah , or , as it ought to be written , Massorethmeans tradition . The text in our

, printed Bibles is commonly supposed to be the text as settled by a certain body of men called Massorctes , who were the custodians of this tradition . No mistake

could be greater . The Massorctes were not a single body of men or a single school ; the Massoreth is not a single collection of marginal glosses establisbiu g for ever one uniform text . On the contrary , the Massoretes were learned annotators ,

belonging to many schools , ancl their marginal annotations vary considerably in different copies . The Eastern Recension differs from the Western , and the different families of MSS . belongtothelatter , French , German , Italian , ancl Spanish , present more

or less considerable variations . Tho critical value of these glosses consists in the fact that the labours of the Massoretes were directed to the careful enumeration of all the words ancl phrases of the Bible . The marginal note tells us exactly

bow often each particular grammatical form and each phrase occurs in the whole Bible and in tho several books , ancl also in what sense it is emplo 3 ed . It is obvious , therefore , at a glance that no new reading could creep into a jiassage without being

immediately detected . The seribe may make a blunder , but the Massoreth checks it ; for the Massoreth is not the compilation of the scribe who copies it , but is taken

from model codices of a much earlier date , The extreme minuteness of this verbal criticism has so multi plied and has been carried to such an extent , that Elias Levita says in his work on the Massoreth , that he believes that if all the words of the Great Massoreth which he had seen in

the days of his life , were written down and bound up in a volume , it would exceed in bulk all the 24 books of the Bible . Only two attempts haVc yet been made to collect these scattered notes aud glossesthe one in the well-known work entitled

Oehlah-ve-Ochlah , the other in Yakob ben Cbayyim ' s Rabbinic Bible , published at A enice in 1526 . But Dr . Ginsburg has done far more than his predecessors in the same field . AVith infinite pains ancl labour he has collected ancl digested this vast mass

of textual criticism . For the first time the Hebrew scholar will really know what the Massoreth is . Hitherto , as we have said , it has been scattered in . a number of different MSS ., often written in the form of an ornamental border to the text in minute characters and with many abbreviations , and in many cases requiring not only great patience , but a wide ac-