This is an Old Testament text, established in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. by Jewish scholars.¹

The scribes, known as Masoretes, tried to preserve the meaning of the Scriptures. Considering the effective system of vowel marks developed by a small Jewish sect in Babylon about A.D. 500, a Masoretic family named ben Asher produced a better system of vowel markings in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. The ben Asher text comes to us in several forms, including Codex C, Codex P, and Codex A.

In 1524, Jacob ben Hayyim published a printed text of the Hebrew Old Testament, using manuscripts that he had been copied from the ben Asher manuscripts. Because this was the first printed edition of the Hebrew Old Testament, it became a standard for printed Bibles. Gerhard Kittel's Biblica Hebraica, perhaps the best known Hebrew Old Testament of the twentieth century, listed the variations of the ben Hayyim text in its footnotes and did not include them in the text.²

I have been advised also that the ben Chayyim text was used for both Kittel's editions of 1906 and 1912 and that the ben Asher text was adopted by Kittel for his third edition of Biblia Hebraica in 1937.

1. New Jerusalem Bible, 1985. Foreword.
2. The Bible Almanac. Nelson, 1980. Pages 70, 71.