The earliest Hebrew manuscript is the Nash papyrus. There are four fragments, which, when pieced together, give twenty-four lines of a pre-Massoretic text of the Ten Commandments and the shema (Ex., xx, 2-17; Deut., v, 6-19; vi, 4-5). The writing is without vowels and seems paleographically to be not later than the second century. This is the oldest extant Bible manuscript (see Cook, "A Pre-Massoretic Biblical Papyrus" in "Proceed. of the Soc. of Bib. Arch.", Jan., 1903). It agrees at times with the Septuagint against the Massorah. Another pre-Massoretic text is the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritan recension is probably pre-exilic; it has come down to us free from Massoretic influences, is written without vowels and in Samaritan characters. The earliest Samaritan manuscript extant is that of Nablûs, which was formerly rated very much earlier than all Massoretic manuscripts, but is now assigned to the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. Here mention should be made of the non-Massoretic Hebrew manuscripts of the Book of Ecclesiasticus (q.v.). These fragments, obtained from a Cairo genizah (a box for worn-out or cast-off manuscripts), belong to the tenth or eleventh century of our ear. They provide us with more than a half of Ecclesiasticus and duplicate certain portions of the book. Many scholars deem that the Cairo fragments prove Hebrew to have been the original language of Ecclesiasticus (see "Facsimiles of the Fragments hitherto recovered of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew", Oxford and Cambridge, 1901).
All other Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible are Massoretic, and belong to the tenth century or later. Probably the earliest Massoretic manuscripts are: "Prophetarium Posteriorum Codex Bablyonicus Petropolitanus", dated A.D. 916; the St. Petersburg Bible, written by Samuel ben Jacob and dated A.D. 1009; and "Codex Oriental. 4445" in the British Museum, which Ginsburg (Introduction, p. 469) assigns to A.D. 820-50. The text critics differ very widely in the dates they assign to certain Hebrew manuscripts. De Rossi is included to think that at most nine or ten Massoretic manuscripts are earlier than the twelfth century (Variæ Lectiones, I, p. xv).
The critical study of this rich assortment of about 3400 Massoretic rolls and codices is not so promising of important results as it would at first thought seem to be. The manuscripts are all of quite recent date, if compared with Greek, Latin, and Syriac codices. They are all singularly alike. Some few variants are found in copies made for private use; copies made for public service in the synagogues are so uniform as to deter the critic from comparing them. All Massoretic manuscripts bring us back to one editor -- that of a textual tradition which probably began in the second century and became more and more minute until every jot and tittle of the text was almost absolutely fixed and sacred. R. Akiba seems to have been the head of this Jewish school of the second century. Unprecedented means were taken to keep the text fixed. The scholars counted the words and consonants of each book, the middle word and middle consonants, the peculiarities of script, etc. Even when such peculiarities were clearly due to error or to accident, they were perpetuated and interpreted by a mystical meaning. Broken and inverted letters, consonants that were too small or too large, dots which were out of place -- all these oddities were handed down as God-intended. This lack of variants in Massoretic manuscripts leaves us hopeless of reaching back to the original Hebrew text save through the versions. Kittel in his splendid Hebrew text gives such variants as the versions suggest.