Due to the holiness of the Hebrew Bible (Tanack) and its impor- tanceto Jewish life, it was required that its text andform be carefully preserved. With a long history oftransmission, first orally and later written, theBiblical Hebrew text contained archaisms, rareforms, unusual spellings, unique words, grammaticalinconsistencies, etc., which, however, weremaintained. Nothing was to be changed or added tothis sacred corpus the consonantal text of which isconsidered to have been established around the 2ndcentury C.E.

This process of standardization of the Biblical Hebrewtext culmi- nated in the so-called Masoretic periodwith the work of the Masoretes. Generation aftergeneration from a shaky start in the early Islamicperiod, i.e. around the6th–7th centuries C.E., anduntil the mid 10th century C.E., whentheir activities ceased, the Masoretes have beenresponsible for safeguarding the integrity anddiversity of the Hebrew Bible's text. They were thescholars who wrote down the traditions of reading,which were transmitted orally before, createdcantillation signs and vowels and included then inthe text of the Bible. Furthermore, in order topreserve the many quirks, anomalies andpeculiarities of the Hebrew text they created a bodyof the textual notes, which forms the Masora.

In spite of scarce testimonies, we know very littleabout the long period between the first Masoretes inthe 2th century and those in the9th-10th centuries C.E. Thismakes it impossible to reconstruct the developmentand transmission of the Masora in detail.

The places of origin of some of these Masoretes suggestthe existence of two main centers of the Masoreticwork: Tiberias in Palestine, and Nehardea inBabylon. The work of the Masoretes also points tothese two centers and adds Sūra as an additionallocation in the realm of Babylon. Therefore theMasoretic centers show some geographical parallelsto the Jewish academies (yeshivot) in Palestine and Babylon andto the nascent Muslim circles of learning inBaghdād.