Footnote 4 – Keep Each Tradition Separate

The notations help to preserve the text by clarifying unusual spellings, indicating where words appear elsewhere in the Bible and identifying those unique words that appear only once in the Bible, among other things. See the sidebar to this article, and Marc Brettler, “The Masoretes at Work: A Tradition Preserved,” sidebar to “The Leningrad Codex,” BR 13:04.