The Hebrew Masora are primarily the marginal notes that clarify the unvocalized Hebrew Biblical text. Syriac, the Aramaic dialect often touted as “the language of Jesus,” also has a solely consonantal alphabet. While several systems of vocalization did develop, Syriac scribes began to compile analogous lists of words and phrases, precisely vocalized, to be used as reading guides alongside full translations of patristic and Biblical texts.
Translations from the Greek fathers rarely had any vocalization, as many expressions were transliterated from the Greek into Syriac characters, presenting a challenge to readers regarding how to properly pronounce and translate these unfamiliar words. The replacement of Syriac by Arabic as the spoken vernacular in the latter part of the first millennium induced a similar loss of the nuances of Syriac pronunciation for its linguistic heirs. These companion reading lists, which enabled the discerning reader to comprehend difficult and ambiguous parts of the text, were dubbed Masora by William Wright in his Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum (three volumes, 1870–1872), and the label stuck.
Jonathan Loopstra has located ten such large manuscripts, 300–400 pages each, compiled during the 10th–13th centuries as part of the intellectual revival called the Syriac Renaissance. These include long lists of words and short texts, seldom as long as a complete sentence, culled from a large repertoire, ca. 300–500 original texts. Finding no description or guidelines on how these Masora were meant to be used, Loopstra speculates that those using these Masora were guided by an experienced teacher through the labyrinth. There are hints indicating that these “words and readings”—the title generally given to these manuals—were part of a set curriculum into which users would have been initiated.
This genre evidently disappeared after the early 13th c., its special use no longer being required, and these Masora manuscripts were probably no longer comprehensible to scribes and readers.
Moving progressively through these manuscripts, Loopstra illustrates their contents and suggests several ways by which they were used, admitting that, while the Masora were meant to alleviate ambiguity, their method is no longer clear.
Loopstra focuses on the Patristic Masora whose companion manuscripts were full Syriac translations of five Greek authors: Pseudo-Dionysius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, collected epistles between Gregory and Basil, and Severus of Antioch. Early translations of these works tended to be periphrastic, but later Syriac translations were more literal, transliterating Greek terms more frequently, to which the Masora were keyed.
The texts, words, and phrases in the Masora are listed sequentially, aligned with the subject matter of the full translation manuscript—which could produce difficulties since the source translation is not identified. Loopstra believes that a significant percentage were for the purpose of vocalization and pronunciation of words, especially Greek.
The focus of the Masora editors is on homophones and homographs and difficult words that would have required tagging dots and vowels to help the reader distinguish between similar forms of the word. Recent studies have shown that 10 percent of Syriac lexicons consist of homophones.
In order to illustrate, Loopstra chose one of the earliest Masora manuscripts, Damascus Syriac Ms. 7/16 (1004 CE), located in the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Library, now in Atchaneh, Lebanon. Damascus Syr 7/16 contains 10,808 words and phrases, with excerpts from 357 writings, 255 being works of the Greek fathers, and covering ca. 2,146 folios in the manuscripts of the full texts.
The majority of this volume contains a detailed transcription and summary of Damascus Syriac Manuscript 7/16 in chart form. The Masora have headings for each Greek author. Under these headings, Loopstra utilizes four columns. The first is the Syriac entry in Dam Syr 7/16, that is, the Masora and the folio numbers in this manuscript. The second column is the folio number in the corresponding full Syriac translation. The third column gives the Greek word to which the Masora is referring. The fourth column is the location of that Greek word or phrase in a standard published edition. A monumental task to compile, but a much more comprehensible format by which to illustrate and refer to this work.
The Masora give evidence of the development and sophistication of the Syriac language, since a number of the vowels and phonological marks employed in distinguishing particular words have long fallen out of use in Syriac composition. Through a sample text, Gregory Nazianzen's Oration 1, “On the Holy Feast of the Pascha,” found in British Library Manuscript 12153 (9th c.), Loopstra is able to indicate the general features of many Masora entries. The words selected are not necessarily rare words, and, despite the size of these manuscripts, only a relatively small number of words out of the total have been singled out. Most sample texts come from a few select portions of the underlying text, which Loopstra calls “pockets.”
Inevitably, there are problems and errors in the Masora. Most frequently, the scribe misplaces the sample text out of its sequential order in the full translation. Often this occurs from a scribe copying long lists of words from other Masoretic lists, and so perpetuating misreading and misplacements. The scribe occasionally copied marginal notes from the full translation that are not part of the literary text and included them in the Masora, piling on confusion for the unsuspecting reader.
This is an unusual literary genre that, while used extensively, did not have a long life-span. Its complexity, Loopstra keeps emphasizing, illustrates the high level of intellectual achievement during these several centuries. The tremendous number of literary works upon which the Masora drew demonstrate as well the breadth and depth of learning to which an early second millennium Syriac reader had access and was expected to attain and master. Loopstra has directed his readers towards a measured, yet profound appreciation of the richness of scholarship depicted in these lists of words and readings.
