Masoretes [SEP] named after
Bible, the Tanakh, for the worldwide Jewish community.
The ben Asher family of Masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text, although an alternative Masoretic text of the ben Naphtali Masoretes, which has around 875 differences from the ben Asher text, existed. The halakhic authority Maimonides endorsed the ben Asher as superior, although the Egyptian Jewish scholar, Saadya Gaon al-Fayyumi, had preferred the ben Naphtali system. It has been suggested that the ben Asher family and the majority of the Masoretes
. Jeremiah describes Babylonian officials, some named and the rest unnamed, who according to the text sat down "in the middle gate" of Jerusalem during its destruction in 587 or 586 BCE. The portion which explicitly gives the names and/or titles of the officials reads, in Hebrew, "nrgl śr ʾṣr smgr nbw śr skym rb srys nrgl śr ʾṣr rb-mg". Various interpretations have divided the names in various ways. The King James Version, sticking closely to the grammatical indicators added to the text by the Masoretes