Sebirin in the Masoretic Notes

What a Sebir Is

The Masoretes who pointed the great Tiberian codices wrote more than one kind of note in the margins of the biblical text. The most familiar are the Masorah parva and Masorah magna, which count forms, mark unique spellings and record the official ketiv and qere, the written form and the form that is to be read. Alongside those notes there is another class of alternative, usually abbreviated in the same margin, and known as sebir in the singular and sebirin in the plural. The word is the passive participle of the verb סבר, “to think”, “to believe” or “to suppose”. Elias Levita, in the eighth section of his Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538, took the term to denote “incorrect opinions, imagination, fantasy, supposition”: a case in which someone thinks that the text is one way, when it is not.^[1] Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, in his Minhat Shai on Genesis 30:40, quoted Levita almost verbatim.^[2]

Aron Dotan, in the standard survey of the Masorah in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, describes the sebirin as a type of variant “different from all these in that it is cited in order to be rejected, i.e., in order to prevent possible error by the reader.” The tempting wording, he adds, is “occasionally more reasonable than the text.” The notes are worded as “there are some who believe [that the text is…]”, or more sharply “there are those who believe and err”; in the Babylonian Masorah the corresponding terms mean “there are some who err in them” and “which fits it [the text] better.”^[3] Israel Yeivin, after weighing several hypotheses, concluded that the notes “indicate readings that try to avoid some difficulty in the received text, but whose purpose is to warn that this is not the correct reading. They are, therefore, a support of the received text.”^[4]

Examples and the Range of the Lists

Dotan illustrates the phenomenon from Genesis 19:23, where the Hebrew says that the sun went out over the earth as Sodom was destroyed. In three places, the Masorah records, the verb is written in a form that some readers would rather recast as feminine, to agree with “sun”; “they are not correct and it is not to be read that way.” A second example is Exodus 21:30, where in two places some would substitute one preposition for another, “and they are wrong.” Dotan also allows that in some cases the term is simply a warning about a possible error, and not the record of a real alternative version.^[5]

The number of such notes is not stable. Dotan observes that older manuscripts may have only dozens of sebirin, while later editions, including C. D. Ginsburg’s Bible, rise to about three hundred and fifty. The difference has two causes. Some manuscripts simply omit the sebir at many places; others present the “errant” wording as the ketiv and the accepted wording as the qere, so that the same disagreement is classified under another name. “Although the origin of some of these variants is clearly ancient,” Dotan writes, “it seems that the number of logically possible – but rejected – variants increased with time and the copying of the manuscripts.”^[6] Emilia Fernández Tejero, in a study of the sebirin of Joshua in the Cairo, Aleppo and Leningrad codices, the Complutensian manuscript M1 and Jacob ben Hayyim’s Rabbinic Bible, reached a similar conclusion about their purpose. Against Ginsburg, and despite the fact that some manuscripts treat a given reading now as a sebir and now as a qere, she formulates the contrast as a rule: the ketiv/qere tells the reader “read thus”; the sebir warns “do not even think of reading thus.”^[7]

Ginsburg’s Other Account

Christian D. Ginsburg devoted a whole chapter of his Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897) to the sebirin, and he judged them “of equal importance to the class of variants comprised in the official Keri,” even “more important” in some respects, though modern editors had “either entirely banished the Sevir from the margin or have on extremely rare occasions condescended to notice” one. In the manuscripts, he pointed out, a sebir is written in the margin of the text in the same way as a qere.^[8]

Ginsburg’s principal evidence was that the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably from one witness to another. A list in the Masorah of the St Petersburg Codex of the Prophets (the Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus) of 916 records seven passages in which the ketiv is אל “unto” and the qere is על “upon”; one of them is Ezekiel 13:2, where that Codex duly marks the qere in the margin. In the first edition of Jacob ben Hayyim’s Masoretic Bible, however, the Masorah on the same verse says that this is “one of the five instances in which the Sevir is על upon.” “The identical variant which is called Keri by one School of Massorites,” Ginsburg concluded, “is called Sevir by another School.” He gave further cases at Isaiah 30:32, Jeremiah 17:24 and Ezekiel 14:4, which a Masoretic rubric describes as sebirin but which the Masorah parva calls qere.^[9] He also showed that some schools, “though bound to give it as an integral portion of the Massorah, have yet passed sentence against it,” treating the sebir as a rejected suggestion rather than as a reading to be adopted.^[10]

The modern disagreement is therefore not about whether the notes exist, or about the wording of particular examples, but about what the Masoretes meant by writing them. Ginsburg emphasised the cases in which one school’s sebir is another school’s qere, and he wanted editors to restore the sebirin to the margin of the printed Bible. Dotan, Yeivin and Fernández Tejero emphasise the language of the notes themselves — “there are those who believe and err” — and the fact that, in the principal Tiberian codices, the sebir is not taken into the reading. Both observations are grounded in the evidence. A reader who meets a sebir in the margin of the Leningrad Codex or the Aleppo Codex should not automatically treat it as a qere; nor should the manuscript variation that Ginsburg documented be ignored. The note is part of the Masoretic apparatus, and it has to be interpreted manuscript by manuscript.

Why the Notes Still Matter

The sebirin belong with the other special classes of Masoretic remark — the tiqqune soferim, the ketiv and qere, and the lists collected in Okhlah ve-Okhlah — as evidence of how the guardians of the text thought about difficulty, habit and error. A tempting grammatical agreement, a more usual preposition, a smoother number or gender: these are exactly the changes a careful scribe or a later reader might make, and the Masorah’s habit is to notice the temptation and to record it. Whether a given note is a rejected suggestion, a school variant, or a warning without a real alternative, it tells the history of how the received wording was defended. For the user of a modern edition, the practical lesson is the one Fernández Tejero draws from Joshua: before a marginal alternative is treated as a recommended reading, the term that introduces it has to be read with care.

Selected Bibliography