But you may wonder: Were not the Hebrew Scriptures completed before Christ? How could this text be from as late as the year 1008? To understand this matter better, we need to know a little about the Masoretes.

The Masoretes (in Hebrew, Baalei Hamasorah, “Lords of Tradition”) lived in the centuries after Christ and were extremely accurate copyists of the Hebrew Scriptures.

There was an excellent Masoretic text in the synagogue of the Sephardim in Aleppo, Syria. It was compiled by the famous Ben Asher family and was prepared about the year 930 C.E.