BIBLE
Out of context: Reply #140
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From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
"The oldest books of the Bible are the Pentateuch, also known as the Torah. They are written in Hebrew and are also called the 'Books of Moses'. Traditionally Judaism and Christianity held that these books were actually written by the lawgiver Moses, but many today believe that the current form of the Torah came about by a redactor bringing together several earlier, distinct sources
The original text of the Tanakh was in Hebrew, with some portions (notably in Daniel and Ezra) in Aramaic. From the 800s to the 1400s, rabbinic Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes compared the text of all known Biblical manuscripts in an effort to create a unified and standardized text; a series of highly similar texts eventually emerged, and any of these texts are known as Masoretic Texts (MT). The Masoretes also added vowel points (called niqqud) to the text, since the original text only contained consonants. This sometimes required the selection of an interpretation, since words can differ only in their vowels, and thus the text can vary depending upon the choice of vowels to be inserted. In antiquity there were other variant readings which were popular, some of which have survived in the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea scrolls, and other ancient fragments, as well as being attested in ancient translations to other languages."