PRINTED MASORAH • LONDON 1897 • MANUSCRIPTS

Christian D. Ginsburg and the Printed Massorah

Much of what this site cites about the printed and the manuscript Masorah comes from one nineteenth-century scholar, Christian D. Ginsburg. He compiled the notes from manuscripts into a printed Massorah, edited the introductions of Jacob ben Hayyim and of Elias Levita, and in 1897 published his Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible. This note describes those books as tools. The journal essay places the man in his time.

The Massorah
compiled from manuscripts and printed in volumes, with lists cited throughout the Introduction
Introduction
London, Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897
Earlier editions
Jacob ben Hayyim’s introduction, 1867, and The Massoreth Ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita, 1867
A working habit
the collation of standard manuscripts in the British Museum against printed editions
Ink-and-watercolour illustration in the same style as the reference picture: bright natural daylight, clear consistent linear perspective, warm stone and wood, cream parchment, blue sky. All objects at realistic relative scale: a closed book has the thickness and length of a real bound volume on a table, an inkwell is small enough to sit in the palm, a reed pen or pointer is about as long as a hand, a table is ordinary table height, a stool is stool height, an arch or doorway is the height of a room. Nothing is gigantic or miniature relative to anything else. No people, no faces, no hands, no crosses or Christian symbols, no window glass and no glazing bars, no legible writing and no pseudo-script, no letters, numbers or marks that look like an alphabet. A wide wooden desk with two open volumes of ordinary book size side by side, cream pages faintly ruled into columns and without letters, and a short stack of three closed books of realistic thickness behind them. An unglazed rectangular opening looks onto a leafy garden.
Illustration: an open volume and a short stack of closed books, for Ginsburg’s printed Massorah and his Introduction of 1897.
The books at a glance
Christian D. Ginsburg and the Printed Massorah
What the Introduction covers: the sections of the text, the qere, the sebirin, the Eastern and Western readings, the model codices, and the early printed Bibles
A typical list: the eighteen emendations, taken from the Masorah of the Prophets of 916 and from the midrashim
A typical collation: six British Museum codices compared with Baer’s sections in the Former Prophets
A typical edition: the 1867 English text of Levita, still the usual route to that book

The Introduction is cited on this site from the copy digitised at the Internet Archive.

The Massorah Compiled from Manuscripts

Ginsburg’s Massorah is a printed collection of masoretic lists drawn from manuscripts. He cites it by letter and paragraph, as when he points to the list of the eighteen emendations of the scribes in letter he, §206, volume II, page 710, or to the list of variations between the Mugah and the Hilleli in volume III.[1] The work is not a facsimile of any one codex. It is a compilation, and a citation from it always means a list as Ginsburg edited it from the copies he used.

That compilation made it possible to discuss the Masorah as a body of lists, not only as notes encountered one at a time in the margin of a Bible. Later editions, including Weil’s Massorah Gedolah, take a different base, the Leningrad Codex, and a different form. The two should not be treated as interchangeable.

Ink-and-watercolour illustration in the same style as the reference picture: bright natural daylight, clear consistent linear perspective, warm stone and wood, cream parchment, blue sky. All objects at realistic relative scale: a closed book has the thickness and length of a real bound volume on a table, an inkwell is small enough to sit in the palm, a reed pen or pointer is about as long as a hand, a table is ordinary table height, a stool is stool height, an arch or doorway is the height of a room. Nothing is gigantic or miniature relative to anything else. No people, no faces, no hands, no crosses or Christian symbols, no window glass and no glazing bars, no legible writing and no pseudo-script, no letters, numbers or marks that look like an alphabet. Close view of two open volumes of ordinary book size, cream pages faintly ruled into columns and without letters, with the edge of a closed book at the top of the frame. Wooden desk only. No window, no garden, no people.
Illustration: a close view of two open books, one of them on a higher shelf, without the garden.

The Introduction of 1897

The Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, published at London in 1897, is a handbook to the text Ginsburg was editing. It describes the open and closed sections, the later letters in the gap, the Christian chapters, the qere, the sebirin, the Eastern and Western readings, the differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, the emendations of the scribes, the model codices, and the early printed Bibles, from the first editions of the fifteenth century to Bomberg and Baer.[2]

The method is consistently comparative. For the sections of the Former Prophets Ginsburg collated six standard manuscripts in the British Museum, among them Arundel Oriental 16, which he calls a model Codex, and set their evidence against Baer’s printed text. For the eighteen emendations he set the Masorah of the Prophets of 916 beside the Mekhilta, the Sifre, the Yalkut and the Tanchuma. Those collations are used on the pages on the open and closed sections and on the eighteen emendations.

A Working Method

Two earlier books prepared that method. In 1867 Ginsburg published an English edition of Jacob ben Hayyim’s introduction to the second Rabbinic Bible, and, in the same year, the Hebrew text of Levita’s Masoret ha-Masoret with an English translation, a biography and notes.[3] Both remain standard means of access to those works.

The journal essay treats Ginsburg’s life and the character of his scholarship. This note is only a guide to the books a reader of this site will meet most often, and to the distinction between a list as a manuscript has it and a list as Ginsburg printed it.

The journal essay on Christian D. Ginsburg The Introduction of 1897 Seligmann Baer

Selected Bibliography

[1] Ginsburg, Introduction, citing The Massorah
Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London, 1897), citing The Massorah, letter he, §206, vol. II, p. 710, and vol. III, on the lists compiled from manuscripts. *
[2] Ginsburg, Introduction, 1897
Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897), the handbook to his edition, covering the sections, the qere, the model codices and the early printed Bibles. *
[3] C. D. Ginsburg, The Massoreth Ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita, 1867
Christian D. Ginsburg, The Massoreth Ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita (London, 1867). In the same year he published an English edition of Jacob ben Hayyim’s introduction to the Rabbinic Bible, cited by Dotan, “Masorah,” §3.3.6.3, as “ed. Ginsburg, pp. 82–83.” *
Christian D. Ginsburg (journal) · Seligmann Baer and the Leipzig Hebrew Bible · Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret · Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible · The Eighteen Emendations of the Scribes
Companion notes on this site.

This note describes Ginsburg’s printed books from the Introduction of 1897 and from the 1867 editions. It does not repeat the journal essay on his life.