The Unusual Letters of the Hebrew Bible

The consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible is not quite uniform in appearance. In a small number of places, both in Torah scrolls and in the Masoretic codices, letters are written larger or smaller than the surrounding script, raised above the line, marked with dots, or replaced by signs that resemble an inverted letter. These features were transmitted with the text itself, and the Masorah drew attention to them in its marginal notes. They were not introduced by the medieval Masoretes, for most of them are already discussed in the rabbinic literature, and several of them were explained there as records of textual uncertainty or of deliberate alteration. Aron Dotan, in his account of the transmission of the text, groups them as irregularities in the actual shape of the writing that form part of the copied text, and he treats them in what he takes to be their chronological order: the extraordinary points, the isolated letters or signs, the suspended letters, the large and small letters, and a residual class of other odd letters.¹

This essay follows Dotan’s order, drawing on the rabbinic evidence he cites, on Christian David Ginsburg’s extensive discussion in his Introduction of 1897, and on the halakhic treatment of the subject by Maimonides. It concludes with a different sign, the large marginal letter resembling nun or zayin found in some early codices, which has sometimes been associated with the inverted nun but which, as recent work has shown, belongs to a different category.

The Extraordinary Points

Dotan counts fifteen words in the Bible over which dots are written, and in one case also beneath them, with one dot over each letter of the word or over some of its letters. Ten are in the Torah, four in the Prophets, where the dots are always above, and one in the Writings, the word לוּלֵא (lule, “were it not”) in Psalms 27:13, which has dots both above and below in varying numbers. At the tenth place in the Torah, Deuteronomy 29:28, the dots in most traditions cover eleven letters of three words, לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד, “to us and to our children for ever”, all except the last letter. Dotan notes that the traditions differ in details, and for the complete enumeration he directs the reader to the Masorah magna on Numbers 3:39 and in section 96 of the Masoretic compilation ʾOkhlah ve-ʾOkhlah.²

The tradition of the points is very old. Dotan cites the Mishnah, Pesahim 9:2, where Rabbi Yose speaks of the dotted he in the word רְחֹקָה (“far off”) in Numbers 9:10, which places some of the evidence in the second century CE. A complete list of the places in the Torah is already found in Sifre Numbers, where Shimon bar Yochai is mentioned, and further evidence appears in the Talmud and the Midrashim. Dotan adds that the points do not belong to the system of vocalisation and that they appear also in Torah scrolls prepared for public reading.³ This last observation distinguishes them sharply from the vowel signs and accents, which are never written in a scroll for liturgical use. The points belong to the consonantal text in the strict sense.

Ginsburg regarded the points as the earliest surviving result of textual criticism on the part of the scribes, and he devoted a long section of his Introduction to them. He noted that the marginal Masorah gives the puzzled reader no solution, recording only that a letter or word has an extraordinary point. The record of their meaning, he argued, survives in the rabbinic literature, and he took the list in the Sifre on Numbers 9:10 as the oldest form of it. In that list each dotted passage is followed by a short explanation. At Genesis 16:5, “the Lord judge between me and thee”, the passage is said to be dotted because Sarah spoke only with respect to Hagar; at Genesis 18:9, “Where is Sarah thy wife?”, it is dotted because the visitors knew where she was; at Genesis 33:4, “and he kissed him”, the dots indicate, according to one view, that Esau did not kiss Jacob sincerely, while Shimon bar Yochai held that at that moment Esau’s feelings had changed and he kissed him with his whole heart.⁴

The remaining items in the Sifre list follow the same pattern. At Genesis 19:33 the dot on the word “nor when she arose” is said to show that Lot did not know when his daughter lay down but did know when she arose. At Genesis 37:12, where Joseph’s brothers went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem, the dots indicate that they went only to feed themselves. At Numbers 3:39 the dots over the name of Aaron in the census of the Levites are explained by the claim that Aaron was not among those who did the numbering. At Numbers 29:15 the dots on the word “tenth” are said to show that there was only one tenth measure in the Sanctuary, and at Deuteronomy 29:28 the dots over “to us and to our children” are explained as a promise that when Israel performs what has been revealed, what is concealed will also be revealed. The list closes by returning to Numbers 9:10, with which it began.⁵ In every case the explanation treats the dotted words as qualified, restricted or doubtful in some way, which is the basis of Ginsburg’s interpretation.

Ginsburg drew particular attention to a statement appended to the list of ten in the Midrash on Numbers 3:39 and in the Avot de-Rabbi Natan. There Ezra is represented as saying that if Elijah should come and ask why he had written these words, he would answer that he had already marked them with points; and if Elijah should say that he had written them correctly, he would erase the points. Ginsburg concluded that the ancient authorities regarded the dotted letters and words as doubtful, to be decided by Elijah when he came.⁶ He supported this by showing that later scribes used dots in the same way to mark words for deletion. In the codex of the Prophets written in 916 and now in St Petersburg, he observed, a word in Isaiah 51:4 is dotted in the text while a different reading is given in the margin, and a word in Ezekiel 14:11 is similarly treated, with the dots placed inside the letters because the vowel signs above the line left no room. He also noted that scribes of Greek and Latin manuscripts marked erasures by placing dots above words.⁷

Ginsburg’s reconstruction of the original readings behind the points is more speculative than his account of the sources. For Numbers 9:10, for instance, he argued from the legal inference drawn in the Sifre, that even a man on a short journey who is defiled may not offer the Passover, that the text once had a different conjunction and that the dot on the he was a later reinterpretation of an older note.⁸ Such arguments depend on reading the rabbinic explanations as evidence for lost variant readings, a method he acknowledged owing in part to Ludwig Blau’s Masoretische Untersuchungen. Dotan, more cautiously, lists Blau and other studies as representing various theories on the origin and meaning of the points and does not adopt any of them.⁹ The most that can be said with confidence is that the points are ancient, that the rabbinic sources associated them with doubt about the dotted letters, and that the tradition of where they stand was transmitted with great care.

Ginsburg on the Individual Passages

Ginsburg’s method is clearest when he works through the passages one by one, taking them in the order of the Sifre and then adding the five outside the Torah. His recurring argument is that the oldest explanation, in the Sifre, points to the elimination of a whole word, and that later authorities reduced the dots to a single letter in order to diminish the number of spurious letters in the text. At Genesis 16:5 he took the Sifre’s explanation, that Sarah spoke only with respect to Hagar, to mean that the letters of the suffix “thee” were to be removed and a suffix meaning “her” read in their place, so that the sentence would run “the Lord judge between me and her”. He recorded another opinion, that the dotted letter was to be replaced by a suffix meaning “them”, referring to those who had stirred up strife, and he regarded the Masoretic note in some manuscripts, which states that the second yod is dotted, as a later misunderstanding.¹⁰

At Genesis 18:9 Ginsburg argued that the explanation “they knew where she was” shows that the interrogative “where” was the dotted word, so that the sentence was originally a statement rather than a question. He found this confirmed by the second recension of the Avot de-Rabbi Natan and by the tractate Soferim, both of which name the dotted word as the interrogative. Other manuscripts, he observed, placed the dots on the word “unto him”, or on two of its letters, and he noted that the reading without these letters is supported by the Septuagint.¹¹ At Genesis 19:33 he regarded the Masoretic view that only the second vav of “nor when she arose” carries the dot, distinguishing the full spelling in verse 33 from the defective spelling in verse 35, as an artificial device, and he noted that in some manuscripts the whole word is dotted.¹² At Genesis 33:4 he took the dots over “and he kissed him” to indicate that the word was absent from some manuscripts, and observed that elsewhere in Genesis the expression “to fall on the neck and weep” occurs without any mention of kissing, as at Genesis 45:14 and 46:29.¹³ At Genesis 37:12 he argued that the Sifre’s explanation, that the brothers went only to feed themselves, implies that the words “their father’s flock” were originally dotted, which yields the reading “and his brethren went to feed in Shechem”, in harmony with the question in the following verse; later authorities restricted the dots to the particle marking the object.¹⁴

Two of the passages in Numbers allowed Ginsburg to bring in the ancient versions. At Numbers 21:30 he conceded that the Sifre’s explanation does not reveal which letter or word was originally dotted, and that the first recension of the Avot de-Rabbi Natan and the Midrash draw opposite conclusions from the dot on the resh of the word “which”, the one that the people were destroyed but not the cities and the other that the cities were destroyed but not the people. He argued that the dot indicated a defective text, and pointed out that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch both read the verse without the dotted resh.¹⁵ At Numbers 3:39, where the Sifre’s explanation shows that the dotted word is “and Aaron”, he explained the existence of two textual traditions from the narrative itself. The command to number the Levites was given to Moses alone in Numbers 3:14–15, and the census is attributed to him alone in verse 16, whereas in Numbers 4:41, 45 and 46 Aaron is said to have taken part. The Samaritan and the Syriac omit “and Aaron”, in agreement with the dots, while the Targum and the Septuagint retain it. The Midrash, against the older record, restricts the dot to the conjunction vav.¹⁶ At Numbers 29:15 he observed that the chapter expresses the tenth measure singly in verse 4 and in reduplicated form in verse 10, and that the manuscripts evidently differed at verse 15; the Sifre and the second recension of the Avot de-Rabbi Natan indicate that it should be read as in verse 4.¹⁷

For Deuteronomy 29:28 Ginsburg argued that the Sifre’s explanation implies that the dots originally stood on the words “to the Lord our God”, so that the verse would read that the secret and the revealed things belong to us and to our children for ever, if we do all the words of the Law. He noted that Rashi had already expressed the opinion that these words ought to have been dotted, but that reverence for the divine name had prevented it. A later tradition, preserved in the first recension of the Avot de-Rabbi Natan, the Midrash Rabbah and the Masorah, placed the dots on the four words “to us and to our children for ever”, or on two of them, and Ginsburg regarded the note that the ʿayin alone of the last word is dotted as an error, since the single remaining letter of that word yields no sense.¹⁸

The remaining five passages are not discussed in the Talmud and Midrashim, except for Psalm 27:13. Ginsburg relied for them on the St Petersburg codex of 916, which gives the list of the fifteen dotted passages no fewer than three times, and with which all the other manuscripts he had collated agreed.¹⁹ At 2 Samuel 19:20, in Shimei’s plea to David, the text passes from the third person to the second and back again, and Ginsburg took the dots over the verb “went out” to indicate that a second-person form should be read in agreement with the preceding “do not thou remember”. At Isaiah 44:9 he regarded the dotted word as a dittography of the end of the preceding word, absent from the Syriac, and at Ezekiel 41:20 he took the dotted word “the temple” as a second dittography, written once at the end of the verse and again at the beginning of the next. At Ezekiel 46:22 he noted that the dotted word, rendered “in the corners” in the English versions, is absent from the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Vulgate.²⁰

The last passage, Psalm 27:13, is the only one in the Writings and the only one with dots beneath as well as above the word. Ginsburg cited the Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 4a, where a statement in the name of Rabbi Yose explains the dots on lule as showing that David said before God that he believed the righteous would be rewarded in the world to come but did not know whether he would have a share among them. Ginsburg inferred that Rabbi Yose took the dots to cancel part of the word, and noted that in other recensions the word is entirely absent, as some manuscripts and the Septuagint, Syriac and Vulgate attest. He also observed that certain additions found in some Masoretic rubrics on this passage are absent from the oldest form of the rubric in the St Petersburg codex and from the best manuscripts.²¹ Whatever one makes of his reconstructions, these discussions show how much of the evidence for the points lies outside the Masorah itself, in the rabbinic literature and the ancient versions.

The Isolated Signs

The second group consists of nine signs that stand between verses rather than within words. Two of them enclose the passage beginning “And it came to pass, when the ark set forward”, Numbers 10:35–36, and seven occur in Psalm 107, although there are differences of opinion about their exact place and number. Dotan points out that the baraita in the Talmud, Shabbat 115b, and the Avot de-Rabbi Natan call them not “letters” but simaniyyot, “signs”, and that their form was not fixed in the ancient sources. There is early evidence, in the name of Rabbi Simeon in the Sifre on Numbers, that they were simple dots. Over time they took various shapes and names. In the tractate Soferim they are called by a word that may mean “horn” or “spit”, and in the manuscripts the sign developed into the shape of a reversed nun.²²

The development of the form produced confusion about what the sign should look like and what it should be called. Dotan notes that it is not known whether the whole letter was reversed or only its top or bottom, that some scribes wrote the sign into the text in place of ordinary nuns, and that the name of these signs was eventually confused with the term for the reversed nun that the Masorah records at Genesis 11:32. The later explanation of the term as “reversed”, from a verb in Isaiah 1:4 meaning “they turned backward”, has no linguistic support.²³ Vincent Beiler, in a recent study of another marginal sign, summarises the current understanding of the inverted nun in similar terms: its meaning is debated, but it may indicate that a portion of text is out of place, as the Talmud suggests, and Saul Lieberman found a parallel in Greek texts that used an antisigma, a reversed sigma, to mark misplaced text.²⁴

The rabbinic discussion of the signs in Numbers is recorded in the Talmud, Shabbat 115b–116a. Ginsburg summarised it as preserving two views. According to the earlier view, which he associated with Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel, the signs mark the two verses as not being in their proper place, and in the future the passage will be removed and written where it belongs. According to the later view of Judah ha-Nasi, the signs show that Numbers 10:35–36 forms a book by itself, so that the Torah consists not of five books but of seven, a view supported in the Talmud by the verse “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” in Proverbs 9:1.²⁵ Dotan likewise reports that the opinion already expressed in the ancient sources, that the purpose of the signs in the Torah is to set the passage apart as if it were a separate book, is generally accepted, while there is no similar consensus about the signs in Psalm 107.²⁶

Ginsburg added that the Septuagint places Numbers 10:35–36 before verse 34, which he took as confirmation that the signs mark a dislocation. For Psalm 107, where the signs bracket verses 23–28 and one further verse near the end of the psalm, he found no indication in either the Talmud or the ancient versions of where the bracketed verses might properly belong. The Talmud, he noted, explains the signs there homiletically: verse 23 and those following are furnished with signs, like the restrictive particles “but” and “only” elsewhere in the Bible, to indicate that the prayer of those in danger of shipwreck is heard only before their fate has been decreed, and not afterwards.²⁷ Beiler’s summary adds that the manuscripts themselves do not all agree on the exact verses in Psalm 107 where the sign should appear.²⁸

The Suspended Letters

The Talmud and the Masorah both record four letters written above the line. Dotan lists them: the nun of מְנַשֶּׁה (“Manasseh”) in Judges 18:30, and the ʿayin in מִיָּעַר (“from the forest”) in Psalm 80:14 and in רְשָׁעִים (“wicked”) in Job 38:13 and 38:15. The tradition concerning them is old, going back to the third century CE in the name of Samuel bar Naḥman in the Jerusalem Talmud, and in most cases midrashic explanations are attached to them.²⁹ Ginsburg described the suspended letters as another means by which the scribes recorded variations between different schools.³⁰

The case of Judges 18:30 is the best known. The verse names the priest of the idolatrous sanctuary set up by the tribe of Dan as “Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh”, with the nun suspended. Ginsburg explains that the young Levite of the story was the grandson of Moses, and that the scribes, considering it degrading to the memory of the lawgiver that his grandson should be the first priest of idolatry, raised a nun over the name משה to make it read “Manasseh”. He quotes Rashi: the nun was written because of the honour of Moses, so as to change the name, but it is suspended to tell the reader that it is not Manasseh but Moses. He also cites the Tosefta, Sanhedrin 14, which explains the attribution to Manasseh, the idolatrous king, on the principle that sin is ascribed to the sinner.³¹ Ginsburg observed that the ancient versions divide on the reading, the Septuagint and the Aramaic Targum representing “Manasseh” and the Vulgate “Moses”, and that the early printed editions are also divided, the Soncino editions of 1485–86 and 1488 and the Brescia edition of 1494 having “Manasseh” without the suspended letter, while the Naples edition of 1491–93 and Jacob ben Hayyim’s Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25 have it suspended.³²

The suspended ʿayin in Psalm 80:14 is explained in the Midrash as distinguishing between the swine of the river and the boar of the forest: when Israel is innocent it will be assailed only by the weaker animal from the river, but when it is guilty by the stronger animal from the forest. Ginsburg concluded that the word was originally written without either guttural, so that one school read it “from the river” and another “from the forest”, and he connected the later preference for “forest” with the boar as an emblem of Roman legions. This historical explanation is his own and should be treated as conjecture.³³ His bibliographical observations are firmer. He found that the early editions of the Writings and of the whole Bible printed at Naples, Soncino and Brescia, as well as the Complutensian Polyglot and the quartos of Daniel Bomberg, ignore the suspended letter, that the Salonica edition of the Writings of 1515 is the first in which he could trace it, and that Felix Pratensis in the Rabbinic Bible of 1517 printed the ʿayin as a large letter, probably because some ancient authorities regarded it as the middle letter of the Psalter.³⁴

For the two suspended letters in Job 38, Ginsburg quotes the Talmudic explanation in Sanhedrin 103b, which connects the letter with the fate of those who become chiefs on earth and are poor in heaven, and records the views of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Rabbi Eleazar that it was written so as not to offend the dignity of David and of Nehemiah respectively. As far as he could trace it, Jacob ben Hayyim was the first printer to show the suspended ʿayin in both verses, all earlier editions having the ordinary form of the word.³⁵ The history of the printed text therefore reproduces in miniature the history of the manuscripts: the unusual letters were transmitted by the scribes and noted by the Masorah, but they were by no means always reproduced, and their restoration in print depended on editors who consulted the Masoretic tradition.

Large and Small Letters

The large and small letters form a different kind of group. Dotan states that the custom of writing some letters larger or smaller than usual never became halakhically fixed, so that there are several discrepancies between the manuscripts. Even the lists of the Masorah are not uniform, and Ginsburg compared some ten different lists in the fourth volume of his edition of the Masorah. Large letters are more numerous than small ones. One large letter is already mentioned in the Talmud, Megillah 16b, in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan in the third century, and the tractate Soferim mentions at least four large letters and one small one. Their number grew over time, but the older manuscripts, such as the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, still have relatively few of them.³⁶

This is a significant observation, because it reverses the usual direction of textual loss. In most features of the text, later copies tend to lose detail that earlier ones preserved. In the case of the large and small letters, the later manuscripts have more than the earlier ones, which suggests that the custom grew by accretion as scribes added to the lists or adopted features from one another. The modern reader who encounters a large letter in a printed Bible cannot therefore assume that it represents an ancient tradition, unless it appears in the early lists or in the great Tiberian codices. Felix Pratensis’s treatment of the suspended ʿayin in Psalm 80:14 as a large letter, noted above, shows how one category could pass into another in the hands of an editor.³⁷

Other Odd Letters

Dotan’s last category is that of other odd letters, for which, as he notes, there is generally no evidence in ancient sources. The exception is the vav in the word שָׁלוֹם (“peace”) in Numbers 25:12. The Talmud, Kiddushin 66b, mentions in the name of Rav Naḥman, in the third century, a “cut” vav in this word, which is explained as a vav with a break in the middle, although it is not certain that the Talmud did not mean a vav cut short, that is, a small vav.³⁸ Maimonides, in his Laws of the Torah Scroll, lists among the features that require care odd letters such as the curled pe and the crooked letters.³⁹

The Masorah parva itself records a number of such forms. Dotan mentions a “crooked” nun in Exodus 3:19, an “inverted” nun in Genesis 11:32, and “attached” qofs in Exodus 32:25, the last also listed in section 161 of ʾOkhlah ve-ʾOkhlah. The marginal Masorah of the Venice Bible of 1525 describes the second lamed of a word in Numbers 1:22 as shaped like a saw, standing upright and without a cap on its head. Seligman Baer described the shapes of the various odd letters at length in his Tiqqun ha-Sofer ve-ha-Qore.⁴⁰

The Halakhic Status of the Unusual Letters

The legal treatment of these features is instructive. In the seventh chapter of the Laws of the Torah Scroll, Maimonides instructs the scribe to be careful with the large letters, the small letters, the dotted letters and the letters of unusual shape, such as the curled pe and the crooked letters, as the scribes have transmitted them from one to another, and to be careful also with the crowns of the letters. He then rules that all these matters were stated only as the preferred way of fulfilling the commandment. If the scribe changed this arrangement or did not observe the crowns precisely, but wrote all the letters correctly, did not join one letter to another, did not omit or add, did not spoil the form of any letter and did not change the open and closed sections, the scroll is valid.⁴¹

The contrast with the open and closed sections is deliberate. A scroll in which a section was wrongly written is invalid, while a scroll in which a large letter was written in the ordinary size remains fit for use. The unusual letters therefore occupy an intermediate position: they are transmitted with the text and the scribe is expected to reproduce them, but they are not constitutive of the text in the same way as the letters themselves or the sections. This status agrees with Dotan’s observation that the large and small letters were never fixed in law and vary between manuscripts.⁴² It also helps to explain why the printed editions could ignore suspended letters for several decades without any sense that they were producing a defective text.⁴³

The Marginal Nun or Zayin

A different sign, sometimes associated with the inverted nun, is the large letter resembling nun or zayin that appears in the margins of some early Masoretic codices, often beside a note of ketiv and qere. Beiler’s study of the sign begins from its uneven distribution. The Aleppo Codex does not have it even once, while the Cairo Codex of the Prophets has it more than five hundred times. The Leningrad Codex has it seventy-six times and the codex formerly known as Sassoon 507 forty-two times, and to Beiler’s knowledge it does not occur in British Library Or. 4445 or in the codex formerly known as Sassoon 1053.⁴⁴ It has been suggested that the sign is ancient and perhaps older than the rest of the Masorah, chiefly because it is found in Tiberian, Babylonian and Palestinian manuscripts, and Israel Yeivin observed that it generally fell out of use after the twelfth century.⁴⁵

The meaning of the letter has been much discussed. If it is a nun, it might stand for a word meaning “what is read” or for a word meaning “variant”; if a zayin, for a word meaning “uncertain”; and Yeivin suggested that it might not be a letter at all but a simple mark. Other scholars have proposed that it alerts the reader to a textual problem, or, in the Cairo Codex, that it is a warning marker which draws attention to an issue in the consonantal text without explaining it. Israel Penkower has found that in some early scrolls and in Ashkenazi and Italian codices, though not in Oriental codices, the sign is used to mark section divisions about which there was disagreement.⁴⁶ Beiler himself proposes, from a database of about fifteen thousand notes of the Masorah parva, that the letter, possibly a zayin, had or acquired a practical purpose as a means of avoiding certain kinds of copying error in recording ketiv and qere, and that because it occurs more often in certain script types it can serve as something of a regional identifier.⁴⁷

On the relation between this sign and the inverted nun, Beiler is cautious. It is possible, he writes, that the marginal letter is a later outgrowth of the isolated nun, but the two signs are never confused with one another, despite a possible overlap of meaning, and there is no evidence for such a derivation. Perhaps the signs are only accidentally similar.⁴⁸ The case illustrates a general difficulty in the study of the unusual letters. Signs that look alike in a manuscript may belong to different traditions and serve different purposes, while signs that look different, such as the dots of the Sifre and the reversed nuns of later codices, may be successive forms of the same tradition.

Assessment

The unusual letters of the Hebrew Bible are among the oldest elements of its written transmission. The extraordinary points and the isolated signs are attested in the tannaitic literature of the second century, and the suspended letters in Palestinian sources of the third.⁴⁹ The rabbinic explanations attached to them show that their meaning was already a subject of interpretation in antiquity, and the explanations themselves, as Ginsburg argued, can sometimes be read as evidence of doubt about particular letters or words, even if his reconstructions of the underlying readings go beyond what the sources demonstrate.⁵⁰ The large and small letters and the other odd forms are later and less stable, as the disagreements among the Masoretic lists show, and Maimonides treated all of them as matters of preferred practice that do not affect the validity of a scroll.⁵¹

For the reader of a modern edition, the main lesson is that these features are not a single phenomenon. Some preserve ancient scribal judgements about the text, some record the reverence of later scribes for particular forms, and some, like the marginal nun or zayin, belong to the working apparatus of the Masoretes rather than to the text itself.⁵² The site’s essays on the Tiqqune Soferim and on the Masorah parva and Masorah magna describe related parts of the same tradition, which together show how much of the scribes’ knowledge about their text was recorded in its very appearance on the page.

Notes

1. Aron Dotan, “Masorah”, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edn, at Encyclopedia.com, §1.2.2. *
2. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.1. *
3. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.1. *
4. Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897), pp. 318–320. *
5. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 319–320. *
6. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 320. *
7. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 321. *
8. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 322–323. *
9. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.1. *
10. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 323–324. *
11. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 324–325. *
12. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 325. *
13. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 325. *
14. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 326. *
15. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 326–328. *
16. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 328–329. *
17. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 329. *
18. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 330–331. *
19. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 331. *
20. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 331–333. *
21. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 333–334. *
22. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.2. *
23. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.2. *
24. Vincent D. Beiler, “The Marginal nun/zayin: Meaning, Purpose, Localisation”, in Daniel J. Crowther, Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan (eds), Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022), pp. 75–114, p. 77. *
25. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 341–343. *
26. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.2. *
27. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 343–344. *
28. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, p. 77 n. 6. *
29. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.3. *
30. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 334. *
31. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 335–336. *
32. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 337–338. *
33. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 338–340. *
34. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 340. *
35. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 340–341. *
36. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.4. *
37. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 340. *
38. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.5. *
39. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.5; Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and Torah Scroll, Laws of Torah Scroll, ch. 7, English translation at Mechon Mamre, §8. *
40. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.5. *
41. Maimonides, Laws of Torah Scroll 7, §§8–9. *
42. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.4. *
43. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 337–341. *
44. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, pp. 75–76. *
45. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, p. 76. *
46. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, pp. 76–77. *
47. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, pp. 77–78. *
48. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, pp. 77–78. *
49. Dotan, “Masorah”, §§1.2.2.1–1.2.2.3. *
50. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 318–323. *
51. Dotan, “Masorah”, §1.2.2.4; Maimonides, Laws of Torah Scroll 7, §9. *
52. Beiler, “Marginal nun/zayin”, pp. 77–78. *