Jps Hebrew English Tanakh: The Holy Scripture With The Jps Translation

The Masoretic Text (MT) is the post-Xian Hebrew text of the Bible regarded almost universally as the official version of the Tanakh. It defines not just the books of the Jewish canon, but also the precise letter-text of the biblical books, as well as their vocalization & accentuation known as the Masorah. The MT is also widely used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles & since 1943 for some Catholic Bibles. In modern times the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown the MT to be nearly identical to some texts of the Tanakh dating from 200 BCE but different from others. The MT was primarily copied, edited & distributed by a Jewish group known as the Masoretes between the 7 & 10th centuries. Tho the consonants differ little from the text generally accepted in the early 2nd century (& also differ little from older Qumran texts), it has numerous differences when compared to extant 4th century mss of the Septuagint, a Greek translation (3rd-2nd centuries BCE) of the Hebrew Scriptures that was popular in Egypt & Israel, the source often quoted in the New Testament.
The Hebrew word mesorah (מסורה, alt. מסורת) refers to the transmission of tradition. It can refer to the entire chain of Jewish tradition, but in reference to the Masoretic Text the word has specific meaning: the diacritic markings of the text of the Hebrew Bible & concise marginal notes in mss of the Hebrew Bible which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words.
The oldest extant mss of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century & the Aleppo Codex (once the oldest complete copy of the Masoretic Text, but now missing its Torah section) dates from the 10th century.