Which text of the Hebrew Bible is 'the' text? The Masoretic Text and its rivals

The Masoretic Text is the Hebrew Bible's standard wording today, and the story of how it got that role is a story of careful scribes and surprising variety. It is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism, copied, edited and distributed mainly by a group of scholars called the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries. The masora is their system of diacritic markings and marginal notes recording textual details, usually the precise spelling of words.

It was not always that fixed. The Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 150 BCE to 75 CE) show that in that period there was no uniform text. Lawrence Schiffman classifies 60% of the Qumran texts as proto-Masoretic, 20% as Qumran style with a proto-Masoretic basis, 5% as proto-Samaritan, 5% as Septuagintal and 10% as non-aligned. In those numbers, the proto-Masoretic type is the largest group, but it is not the only one.

Over time, the emphasis on exact wording grew. From Rabbi Akiva's time the idea of a perfect text spread, with strictures that a deviation in even a single letter would make a Torah scroll invalid. Very few manuscripts survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which drastically reduced the number of variants.

The best-known Masoretic manuscript has its own drama. The Aleppo Codex, written in Tiberias around 920 CE, was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. After anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo in 1947 its fate for a decade is unclear; it resurfaced in Israel in 1958 with roughly 40% missing, including most of the Torah.