How the scriptures came down

Every one of these books was spoken before it was written, and what the first hands wrote was less than what the mouths were saying. The letters went down. The vowels did not. For the Torah, for the Gospel and for the Recitation alike, the marks that tell a reader which vowel to sound were added afterwards, by people writing down a reading that was already alive.

What a page held at first

Here is the verse the whole Torah turns on, as this site holds it.

In the Hebrew we serve, that single verse carries twenty-five separate marks above, below and inside its letters. Every one of them was added later. Take them off and the letters stand alone, as they stood on the page for a very long time, while the verse was being said aloud every morning and every evening by people who did not need them.

The Recitation is the same. Take the marks off a sign and the letters remain, four here, three there, waiting for a voice.

Who added the marks, and why

For the Hebrew it was the Masoretes: families of scribes, chiefly at Tiberias, working roughly between the sixth and the tenth century. They did not invent a reading. They wrote down the one their communities had held by heart for generations, and they wrote down the singing with it, so that neither could drift.

For the Arabic the work came earlier and faster, within the first centuries after the Recitation came down. Tradition names grammarians of Basra, and the system of marks in use now is credited to al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad in the eighth century. The reciters were there the whole time; the marks caught up with them.

For the Greek, the oldest complete copies of the Gospel we have are fourth-century codices written in capitals, running on without spaces. Accents, breathings and word breaks came in with later copyists. A reader then was expected to know the language well enough not to need them.

What this does and does not mean

It does not mean the words are uncertain. A book carried in one manuscript can be lost by one fire; a book carried in a thousand mouths cannot. The marks are a record of the saying, not a guess at it, and the saying is the older thing.

It does mean that some of what a translation tells you rests on a later hand. Where two translations of one line differ, the difference sometimes begins before anyone starts translating. That is worth knowing, and it is not a scandal in any of the three.

And it means something about the three together. Jews, Christians and those who submit all hold books that were spoken first and written bare, and all three have later scribes to thank for the reading they now take for granted. On this, the People of the Scripture are in exactly the same position.

Questions people might ask

Does this mean the scriptures were changed?

Not by this. Adding a mark to say which vowel a letter carries is writing down what was already being said. It is different in kind from a passage that appears in one copy and not another, which is a separate question and not this one.

Can I see the bare letters myself?

Yes. Open the reading settings on any chapter and turn on show the letters as they were first written. The Hebrew loses its points and its singing marks, the Arabic loses its vowel marks, and the Greek loses its accents and breathings. Turn it off and they come back. Nothing is changed in what is stored.

Why does the switch leave the dots on the Arabic letters?

Because they are not marks. The earliest Arabic hands did not distinguish between letters of the same shape, and a reader told them apart by sense. In the text we serve, each dotted letter is a character of its own, so there is nothing to take off. The switch shows the letters without their vowels, which is most of the way back, and not the very oldest hand.

Does this explain why the Lord's prayer ends differently in different Bibles?

No, and it is worth being exact. That difference is about which copies a translation follows, not about vowels. Both translations on this site carry the longer ending in Matthew's account (Matthew 6:13). But Luke tells the same prayer and stops sooner (Luke 11:4), and you can set the two side by side here and see it.

If the marks came later, can I read the letters any way I like?

You can look, and looking is worth a great deal. But a reading nobody has ever recited does not become likely because the marks came late. What the marks record is a chain of voices, and where that chain genuinely divided, the divisions were written down and kept. A reading missing from that record is missing for a reason.