Ketiv and Qere: What Is Written and What Is Read

When Leah’s maid Zilpah bears Jacob a son, Leah names him Gad. The Hebrew text of Genesis 30:11 records her words in a way that puzzles every new reader of a Hebrew Bible. The consonants on the page spell one word, בגד (begad, “with good fortune”). The vowels printed under them belong to two words, בָּא גָד (ba gad, “fortune has come”), and a note in the margin tells the reader to say those two words instead.¹ The written form is called the ketiv, “what is written”. The form to be read aloud is the qere, “what is read”. Between about 850 and 1,550 places in the Hebrew Bible carry such a pair, depending on which manuscripts and which lists are counted.² Together they are the most visible sign that the Masoretes guarded two things at once: a written text they would not alter, and a reading tradition they would not abandon.

Two Words, One Place

The Terms

The words are Aramaic, the working language of the Masorah. כְּתִיב (ketiv) means “written”. The other term is usually pronounced qeri, but Robert Gordis argued that this pronunciation arose from the unpointed spelling קרי and that the word should be read qere, either an imperative (“read!”) or a passive participle with the force of the Latin legendum est (“to be read”).³ Either way, the pair describes a single spot in the text where the written letters and the spoken word part company.

How a Manuscript Shows It

In the great Masoretic codices, and in most printed Bibles that follow them, the ketiv stays in the line of text, but the scribe gives it the vowels of the qere. The consonants of the qere stand unpointed in the margin as part of the Masorah parva, followed by the letter ק for qere.⁴ A reader who knows the convention can recover both forms. One who does not will try to pronounce consonants and vowels that were never meant to go together.

Gordis notes that this is the latest of several methods. Originally each qere was written in the margin beside the word and the ketiv was left without vowels. Christian D. Ginsburg followed that method in his editions. The Rabbinic Bibles that descend from Jacob ben Hayyim’s Venice edition of 1524–25 use both: vowels of the qere under the ketiv in the text, and the bare qere again in the margin.⁵ Some modern editions print the ketiv without any vowels at all, since its own pronunciation was never transmitted.⁶ The open digital edition Miqra according to the Masorah, used on Sefaria, puts the ketiv in round brackets and the pointed qere in square ones: at Genesis 30:11, (בגד) [בָּ֣א גָ֑ד].⁷

Signs in the Codices

The marking itself took more than one form. Gesenius’ grammar summarises the convention that became standard: “A small circle or asterisk in the text always refers to the marginal reading.”⁸ Its example is Jeremiah 42:6, where the people promise to obey the Lord “to whom we are sending you”. The text writes the short pronoun אנו (anu, “we”) but gives it the vowels of the longer אֲנַחְנוּ (anaḥnu), which stands in the margin. Read as it stands in the line, the word cannot be pronounced. The reader has to carry the vowels across to the marginal form.⁹

Tov records two older practices. In early manuscripts a qere was sometimes marked by a vertical sign shaped like a final nun, or perhaps a zayin. And some manuscripts of the Masorah describe a qere as yatir, “superfluous”, usually yatir yod or yatir waw, meaning that the reader should skip that letter.¹⁰ Tov’s example is Joshua 10:24, where Joshua summons the officers “who had gone with him”. The written form הֶהָלְכוּא ends in an alef that is not pronounced.¹¹

These conventions are what the great Tiberian codices pass on: the Aleppo Codex, on which the MAM edition is based, and the Leningrad Codex, which Biblia Hebraica prints. In both, the qere note belongs to the Masorah parva in the side margin.¹²

Constant Readings

A few words are read differently every time they occur, and these are not flagged with a marginal note. Scholars call this the qere perpetuum, the constant qere. The scribe simply gives the written word the vowels of the word to be spoken.¹³

The most important case is the divine name. יהוה is written thousands of times, and it is read אֲדֹנָי (Adonai, “my Lord”). The Talmud puts the principle in God’s own mouth: “I am not read as I am written. I am written with yod and he, and I am read with alef and dalet.”¹⁴ When the name stands next to Adonai, it is read Elohim instead, and pointed accordingly, as in Genesis 15:2, אֲדֹנָי יֱהֹוִה.¹⁵ Gordis regarded this as the oldest attested case of a word written one way and read another. The Greek translators of the Pentateuch, working in Egypt in the third century BCE, already rendered the name as Kyrios.¹⁶

Three other constant readings are confined to particular books or names. In the Pentateuch the feminine pronoun “she” is usually written הוא, the same letters as “he”, and pointed הִוא so that it is read hi. When Adam blames Eve in Genesis 3:12, “she gave me of the tree”, the text has הִוא נָתְנָה־לִּי.¹⁷ The Pentateuch writes היא only eleven times. In Genesis 20:5 both spellings stand in a single verse: Abimelech protests that Abraham said “she (הִוא) is my sister” and that “she herself (וְהִיא) said, ‘He is my brother’”. The Samaritan Pentateuch writes היא throughout. The older explanation, that this was an archaic pronoun used for both genders, was rejected by Gesenius’ grammar, which treats it as a spelling habit of one branch of the Pentateuch’s transmission.¹⁸

The word for “girl” works the same way. The Pentateuch usually writes נער, the consonants of “boy”, and points it as if a final he were present, so that it is read naʿarah. When Abraham’s servant prays at the well in Genesis 24:14, “let the maiden to whom I say…”, the text has הַֽנַּעֲרָ, a word that ends in a vowel with no letter to carry it. The one exception is Deuteronomy 22:19, where the word is spelled in full.¹⁹

The tribal name Issachar is written יששכר, with a second sin that is never pronounced. The Masoretes left that letter without a vowel, so the name is read Yissakhar. At Genesis 30:18, where Leah names the child, the Hebrew has יִשָּׂשכָר and the JPS translation notes the wordplay on שְׂכָרִי (sekhari, “my reward”).²⁰ Finally, Jerusalem is almost always written ירושלם, without the yod of the later spelling. The consonants suggest Yerushalem, but the Masoretes placed a ḥireq between the lamed and the final mem, so the name is read Yerushalayim, as in the first mention of the city’s king in Joshua 10:1.²¹

Read but Not Written, Written but Not Read

Two special kinds stretch the system further. Sometimes the Masorah tells the reader to say a word that is not in the text at all: qere we-la ketiv, “read but not written”. The manuscript then carries only the vowels, on blank parchment. At 2 Samuel 8:3, David defeats Hadadezer “on his way to restore his monument at the river”. The text has only בנהר, “at the river”. The reader adds פְּרָת (Perat, “Euphrates”), as the Greek, the other versions and the parallel in 1 Chronicles 18:3 all have.²² In Ruth 3:17, Ruth’s report “for he said to me” has a “to me”, אֵלַי (elay), that is spoken but not written.²³ Jeremiah’s promise that Jerusalem will be rebuilt, in 31:38, opens “See, days are coming”, but the word for “are coming”, בָּאִים (baʾim), has vowels and no letters. MAM prints it in square brackets on its own, with no written form beside it; the Talmud includes it in its list of such words.²⁴

The opposite case, ketiv we-la qere, is a word written but not read. It is left without vowels. In Ruth 3:12 Boaz says “it is true that I am a redeemer”, and between “true” and “redeemer” the text has an extra אם (im, “if”), which is skipped in reading. In 2 Kings 5:18, Naaman’s plea “may the Lord forgive your servant” contains a written נא (na, “please”) that is not pronounced.²⁵ In Ezekiel 48:16 the measurements of the restored city give each side as four thousand five hundred cubits, but on the south side “five”, חמש (ḥamesh), is written twice. The second, unvocalised copy is passed over, and the Talmud names it with Boaz’s “if” among the words written but not read.²⁶

What the Pairs Contain

Euphemism

A baraita in the Babylonian Talmud states the principle plainly: “All of the verses that are written in the Torah in a coarse manner are read in a refined manner.” Its examples are still marked in every Masoretic Bible.²⁷

Among the curses of Deuteronomy 28, verse 30 threatens: “If you pay the bride-price for a wife, another man shall enjoy her.” The written verb is ישגלנה (yishgalennah), which the rabbis considered crude. The reader says יִשְׁכָּבֶנָּה (yishkavennah, “shall lie with her”).²⁸ Three verses earlier, the written ובעפלים (uvaʿofalim), probably “with swellings”, is read וּבַטְּחֹרִים (uvaṭṭeḥorim). The same exchange appears five times in the story of the Philistines and the Ark in 1 Samuel 5–6.²⁹ In 2 Kings 18:27, where the Assyrian Rabshakeh taunts the defenders of Jerusalem that they will “eat their dung and drink their urine”, both nouns are softened in reading.³⁰

The Talmud records a dissent. 2 Kings 10:27 says that Jehu turned the temple of Baal into למחראות, latrines, and the reading tradition softened the word. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korḥa held that it should be read as written, because coarse language was permitted when used in contempt of idolatry.³¹

Grammar, Spelling and Sense

Most pairs are smaller. Many concern a single letter: waw against yod, which were easily confused in the square script, or a form that looks like a plural against one that looks singular. In Genesis 25:23 Rebekah is told that “two nations” are in her womb. The written גיים has a yod where the reading גּוֹיִם (goyim) has a waw.³² In Joshua 6:7 the written ויאמרו (“and they said”) is read וַיֹּאמֶר (“and he said”), so that the instruction to march around Jericho comes from Joshua alone.³³

Some small differences carry real weight. In Psalm 100:3 the written ולא אנחנו means “and not we”, giving “it is he who made us, and not we ourselves”, the reading behind the King James Version. The reader says וְלוֹ (we-lo, “and his”): “he made us, and we are his”. Psalm and verse turn on a single letter, א or ו.³⁴ The same pair, לא (“not”) against לוֹ (“to him”), appears in Job 13:15. The written text gives the despairing line “He may slay me; I have no hope.” The reading gives the famous “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” The Jewish Publication Society’s recent translation follows the ketiv here and says so in a note.³⁵

Old Variants

Other pairs look like two different texts. At Joshua 3:16 the written text says the waters stood “at Adam”, while the qere says “from Adam”. At 2 Kings 16:6 the written text has the Arameans settling in Elath, while the qere has the Edomites. In Hebrew the two names differ only in the easily confused letters resh and dalet. At 2 Samuel 23:13 the written text speaks of “thirty” of David’s warriors, while the qere, like the Greek, the other versions and 1 Chronicles 11:15, reads “three”.³⁶ Emanuel Tov points out that several qere readings are already found in ancient witnesses that are centuries older than the Masoretic manuscripts. At Leviticus 11:21, for example, the Greek and other versions follow the qere לוֹ (“which have”) against the written לא (“not”).³⁷

An Odd Letter in Isaiah

Isaiah 9:6, part of the passage read at Christmas as “For unto us a child is born”, begins in the reading tradition with לְמַרְבֵּה (le-marbeh, “of the increase of”). The written text divides the word in two, לם רבה, so that a final, closed mem appears in the middle of the phrase. Jewish commentators drew lessons from the anomaly, and Gordis records that Christian interpreters found the name of Mary hidden in it.³⁸

The Types at a Glance

The main kinds of pair can be set out with one example each.³⁹

Type	Verse	Written (ketiv)	Read (qere)
Euphemism	Deut 28:30	ישגלנה	יִשְׁכָּבֶנָּה
Waw and yod	Gen 25:23	גיים	גּוֹיִם
Word division	Isa 9:6	לם רבה	לְמַרְבֵּה
Different word	2 Kgs 20:4	העיר (“the city”)	חָצֵר (“court”)
Shorter and longer form	Jer 42:6	אנו	אֲנַחְנוּ
Read but not written	2 Sam 8:3	—	פְּרָת
Written but not read	Ruth 3:12	אם	—
Constant reading	Gen 3:12	הוא	הִוא (hi)

The Rabbis and the Reading

“A Law Given to Moses at Sinai”

The clearest early discussion is in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Nedarim 37b–38a. Rabbi Yitzḥak lists four things that are “halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai”: the vocalisation of the scribes, the ornamentation of the scribes, words that are read but not written, and words that are written but not read. The Gemara then gives examples. Among words read but not written are “Euphrates” in 2 Samuel 8:3, “come” in Jeremiah 31:38, and “to me” in Ruth 3:17. Among words written but not read are the “please” of 2 Kings 5:18, “bend” in Jeremiah 51:3, “five” in Ezekiel 48:16, and the “if” of Ruth 3:12.⁴⁰ The examples are exactly those still marked in the Masorah. Elsewhere the Talmud notes that in 2 Kings 20:4 “it is written ‘the city’, but we read ‘court’”, which again matches the later marginal note.⁴¹

Synagogue practice kept the two forms strictly apart. A Torah scroll must be written with the ketiv, and the reader must pronounce the qere. Gordis notes that Maimonides and the Ṭur disqualify a scroll in which the qere has been written into the text in place of the ketiv.⁴²

Three Scrolls in the Temple Court

A tradition preserved in several rabbinic works describes a different kind of decision. Three Torah scrolls were kept, or found, in the Temple court. They differed in small details, and in each case the sages kept the reading of two scrolls and set aside the reading of one. One scroll had מְעוֹן (meʿon, “dwelling”) in Deuteronomy 33:27, where the others had the feminine form מְעֹנָה (meʿonah). One called the young men sent to offer sacrifices in Exodus 24:5 by the rare word zaʿaṭuṭe instead of נַעֲרֵי (naʿare). And the scrolls disagreed on how many times the Pentateuch spells the feminine pronoun “she” as היא, rather than with the usual Pentateuchal spelling, which looks like the masculine הוא.⁴³

The story is not about ketiv and qere as such. Still, it shows a method of fixing a text by comparing copies, and it has been used to explain them. Tov suggests, cautiously, that when such a comparison was made the qere might preserve a majority reading and the ketiv a minority one. He also notes the difficulty: if so, why was the majority reading not simply written into the text?⁴⁴

Not the Same as “Do Not Read”

The rabbis had another formula that is easily confused with the qere. A sermon may say “do not read (al tiqre) X, but Y”, playing on a different vocalisation or spelling to draw out a lesson. In Berakhot 64a, Isaiah 54:13, “all your children (banayikh) shall be taught of the Lord”, is read as “your builders (bonayikh)”. Tov stresses that such formulas are exegetical wordplay, not readings that the rabbis knew from manuscripts, although a few happen to coincide with variants now found at Qumran.⁴⁵

Why Two Texts? Four Centuries of Explanations

Medieval Answers

Gordis traces the debate from the Middle Ages. The earliest recorded view, that of Profiat Duran in his Maʿaseh Efod, was that Ezra and his successors found conflicting manuscripts and recorded their doubt through the ketiv and qere. David Kimḥi, in the introduction to his commentary on the Former Prophets, blamed the Babylonian exile for scattering scholars and corrupting copies.⁴⁶

Isaac Abravanel, in the introduction to his commentary on Jeremiah, took the opposite line. If the qere were only a variant, he asked, why must it always be read? He argued that Ezra found irregularities of language in the text, which he would not alter, and wrote his corrections in the margin. Jeremiah has so many qere readings, Abravanel suggested, because the prophet himself wrote carelessly. Gordis observes that a view which found errors in the biblical authors was bound to cause offence.⁴⁷ Others, including Naḥmanides, Jacob ben Hayyim and Elias Levita, saw mysteries in the pairs.⁴⁸

Counting and Classifying

Christian Hebraists took up the question in the age of the vowel-point controversy. The Buxtorfs, father and son, defended the variant view. Louis Cappel proposed a mixed theory in his Critica sacra (1650): some qere readings were manuscript variants, some were euphemisms, and some were corrections that the Masoretes, out of reverence, confined to the margin. Gordis says that this “eclectic” view was still the dominant one in his own day.⁴⁹ In 1692 Matthias Hiller argued that Ezra had deliberately varied synonyms when he wrote more than one copy, and that the variants were later gathered into a single manuscript. Johann Gottlob Carpzov’s Critica sacra (1728) blamed the persecution of Antiochus IV and the destruction of Torah scrolls in the 160s BCE.⁵⁰

The counts varied as widely as the theories. Levita fixed the number at 848, a figure Gordis notes is also the numerical value of the Hebrew words qeryan u-ketivan, “qere readings and ketiv forms”. Cappel found 1,548 in Jacob ben Hayyim’s Bible and 1,566 in the Antwerp edition printed by Plantin. Jean Morin counted 1,544 in ben Hayyim’s edition. Gordis, collating the editions of Baer and Ginsburg against ben Hayyim’s Masorah and Norzi’s Minḥat Shai, arrived at 1,350, and admitted that his figure “can make no claim to finality”.⁵¹

Modern Theories

Corrections?

The simplest modern answer was that each qere corrects an error in the ketiv. Hermann Strack and Christian Ginsburg held this view in its pure form.⁵² Tov sets out the objections. Exactly the same word is sometimes the ketiv in one verse and the qere in another. A form “corrected” in one place is left alone elsewhere: the written ויישם of Genesis 24:33 is read וַיּוּשַׂם, but the same spelling in Genesis 50:26 carries no note. Some qere forms are less plausible than the ketiv, such as the imperative הַיְצֵא, read for the written הוצא in Genesis 8:17. And the qere is almost always close to the ketiv in its letters, which would be strange if editors had been correcting freely.⁵³ Gordis put numbers on the point. By his reckoning the qere is the better reading in only 18 per cent of cases, the ketiv is better in 12 per cent, and in 62 per cent the two are equally good.⁵⁴

Variants?

Harry Orlinsky argued that the qere readings began as variants copied into the margins from one or more other manuscripts. Many pairs are indeed the same kinds of small difference, such as similar letters exchanged, that separate manuscripts everywhere, and some qere readings are attested in ancient translations. Against this, Tov notes that a manuscript tradition would hardly produce only one alternative in every case. A compromise is that a single manuscript was collated against another source, or against the majority of several, and the differences were noted.⁵⁵

Guides, Then Variants

Gordis’s own answer was historical. He began from the literal sense of the terms. The earliest qere readings, he argued, were instructions to the synagogue reader: say Adonai for the divine name, use a decent word for an indecent one, and, in a text without vowels, read an ambiguous word correctly. Later, when one manuscript was adopted as the standard copy, good readings from other respected manuscripts were noted in its margin. These became the remaining qere readings, while the ketiv preserved the text of the standard copy. Gordis rejected the common date for that choice, 135 CE, and argued that it must be earlier than the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.⁵⁶

A Reading Tradition

A fourth view, associated with S. Levin, Mordechai Breuer and James Barr, holds that the qere did not come from written sources at all but from the oral reading tradition. Barr pointed out that a manuscript never gives more than one qere, which is what one would expect if the source were a single remembered way of reading aloud.⁵⁷ Tov concludes that most scholars now hold an intermediate view: some qere readings began as corrections, and the notation was later used for optional variants, which in time became obligatory. On that view most of the pairs are an ancient collection of variants.⁵⁸

East and West

The ketiv and qere were not identical everywhere. The Masoretic lists record differences between the Madinḥaʾe, the “Easterners” of Babylonia, and the Maʿarbaʾe, the “Westerners” of the Land of Israel. Sometimes a word that was a ketiv–qere pair for one school was simply written one way by the other. Gordis showed that many of these Eastern readings were much older than the schools themselves, since they are reflected in the Greek, the Peshitta, the Vulgate and the Targums. He also noted that the Babylonian Talmud quotes the Eastern form three times, including two words read but not written in Nedarim 37b.⁵⁹ The Easterners had their own system of vowel signs as well, now known as the Babylonian vocalisation.

Ketiv and Qere Today

Every modern edition has to decide how to show the pairs. Biblia Hebraica Quinta prints the Leningrad Codex with its Masorah, so the marginal notes stand as the scribe wrote them, and its apparatus reports cases of ketiv and qere wherever they affect the meaning.⁶⁰ Translators also have to choose. Most follow the qere, but not always, as the Jewish Publication Society’s notes on Job 13:15 and Jeremiah 2:20 show. In the latter verse, Israel’s boast is translated “I will not work!”, following the written אעבוד, rather than “I will not transgress”, following the qere אֶעֱבוֹר.⁶¹

The system still works much as the Masoretes designed it. The written text keeps the letters exactly as they were received. The vowels, the marginal notes and the voice of the reader carry the way those letters were to be heard. Neither replaces the other. That, more than any single theory of their origin, is what the ketiv and qere show: a scribal culture that preferred to keep two forms side by side, under strict rules, rather than lose either.

Notes

1. Genesis 30:11 in Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), on Sefaria; English glosses after The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition, note ad loc. (“So the kethib, which reads begad; the qere reads baʾ gad ‘luck has come’”). ↩
2. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: Fortress; Assen: Van Gorcum, 2001), p. 58 (“ranging from 848 to 1566 in the different traditions”); Robert Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making: A Study of the Kethib-Qere (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1937), pp. 2, 8–9. ↩
3. Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 7 n. 1. ↩
4. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 58. ↩
5. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 7–8. ↩
6. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 58, citing the Koren and Adi editions. ↩
7. MAM, Genesis 30:11, on Sefaria. The edition’s conventions are described in its version notes there. ↩
8. Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §17 a. ↩
9. Jeremiah 42:6 in MAM, on Sefaria, where the pair appears as (אנו) [אֲנַחְנוּ]; Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §17 a. ↩
10. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 59, citing Yeivin. ↩
11. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 59, 227; Joshua 10:24 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
12. On MAM’s basis in the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, see the version notes to Miqra according to the Masorah on Sefaria; Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 58–59. ↩
13. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 59. ↩
14. Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim 50a, William Davidson translation, on Sefaria. ↩
15. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 59; Genesis 15:2 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
16. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 29–30. ↩
17. Genesis 3:12 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
18. Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §32 l; Genesis 20:5 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
19. Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §17 c; Genesis 24:14 and Deuteronomy 22:19 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
20. Genesis 30:18 in MAM and the JPS translation, on Sefaria; Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §17 c. ↩
21. Joshua 10:1 in MAM, on Sefaria; Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §17 c, which notes that the form is “properly” Yerushalem. ↩
22. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 60; 2 Samuel 8:3 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
23. Ruth 3:17 in MAM, on Sefaria; Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b. ↩
24. Jeremiah 31:38 in MAM, on Sefaria; Babylonian Talmud Nedarim 37b lists it among the words read but not written (the Sefaria translation cites the verse as Jeremiah 31:37), on Sefaria. ↩
25. Ruth 3:12 and 2 Kings 5:18 in MAM, on Sefaria; Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b–38a. ↩
26. Ezekiel 48:16 in MAM, on Sefaria; Babylonian Talmud Nedarim 38a, which lists Jeremiah 51:3, Ezekiel 48:16 and Ruth 3:12 together, on Sefaria. ↩
27. Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 25b, William Davidson translation, on Sefaria. ↩
28. Deuteronomy 28:30 in MAM, on Sefaria; Megillah 25b; Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 63. Tov notes the same pair in Isaiah 13:16, Jeremiah 3:2 and Zechariah 14:2. ↩
29. Deuteronomy 28:27 and 1 Samuel 5:6 in MAM, on Sefaria; Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 63, listing 1 Samuel 5:6, 9, 12; 6:4, 5. ↩
30. 2 Kings 18:27 in MAM, on Sefaria; Megillah 25b. ↩
31. Megillah 25b. ↩
32. Genesis 25:23 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
33. Joshua 6:7 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
34. Psalm 100:3 in MAM, on Sefaria, with the JPS note (“So qere; kethib and some ancient versions ‘not we ourselves’”). ↩
35. Job 13:15 in MAM, on Sefaria, with the JPS note (“So with kethib”). ↩
36. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 61–62. ↩
37. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 62, citing Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 55–56. ↩
38. Isaiah 9:6 in MAM, on Sefaria; Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 13 n. 31. ↩
39. Verse texts from MAM on Sefaria; classification after Gordis, Biblical Text, and Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 58–63. ↩
40. Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b–38a, William Davidson translation, on Sefaria. The Talmud cites Jeremiah’s verse as 31:37, following a different verse division. ↩
41. Babylonian Talmud, ʿEruvin 26a, as cited in Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 59. ↩
42. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 15–16 and n. 3, citing Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Sefer Torah 7:11, and Ṭur, Yoreh Deʿah 275. ↩
43. Sifrei Devarim 356, trans. Martin Jaffee, on Sefaria; Jerusalem Talmud, Taʿanit 4:2, trans. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, on Sefaria; Soferim 6:4, trans. A. Cohen, on Sefaria. The versions differ in their details, including the count of the irregular pronouns. ↩
44. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 62 n. 42. ↩
45. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 59 and n. 40. ↩
46. Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 9. ↩
47. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 12–13. ↩
48. Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 13 n. 31. ↩
49. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 9, 13–14 and n. 32. ↩
50. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 10–11. ↩
51. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 8–9. ↩
52. Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 13. ↩
53. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 60–61; Genesis 8:17 and 24:33 in MAM, on Sefaria. ↩
54. Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 3. ↩
55. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 61–62, citing H. M. Orlinsky, “The Origin of the Kethib-Qere System: A New Approach”, VTSup 7 (1960), pp. 184–92. ↩
56. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 3–5. ↩
57. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 63, citing J. Barr, “A New Look at Kethibh-Qere”, OTS 21 (1981), pp. 19–37. ↩
58. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 63. ↩
59. Gordis, Biblical Text, pp. 70–71, 77. ↩
60. David L. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible? Review of Biblia Hebraica Quinta, Hebrew University Bible, Oxford Hebrew Bible, and Other Modern Editions”, Tyndale Bulletin 61.2 (2010), pp. 214–15. ↩
61. Jeremiah 2:20 and Job 13:15 in MAM, on Sefaria, with the JPS notes. ↩