But their scribal successors, the Masoretes, detected these and recorded them in the Masora, or notes appearing in the margins of the Hebrew Masoretic text they produced.

The Masoretes (of the second half of the first millennium C.E.) sought to transmit the Hebrew text faithfully and made no changes in the wording of the text itself. However, to preserve the traditional pronunciation of the vowelless consonantal text, they devised systems of vowel pointing and accenting. Additionally, in their Masora, or marginal notes, they drew attention to textual peculiarities and gave corrected readings they considered necessary.