The Masoretic Qere-Ketiv system recorded corrected readings in the margin, never substituting them into the Hebrew Bible's consonantal text, because the written letters were treated as unalterable

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The Tiberian Masoretes (6th–10th centuries CE) built a formal annotation system — the Masorah — to preserve the received consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible (the ketiv, "what is written") while separately recording a different, intended reading (the qere, "what is read") for cases of archaic spelling, apparent scribal error, or euphemism. The corrected or intended reading was never substituted into the body text; it was written in the margin, and the marked word in the running text was left exactly as received. Encyclopaedia Judaica's "Masorah" entry, by Masorah scholar Aron Dotan, states the rationale directly: the written letters were a closed, sanctified unit no later corrector had standing to touch, however clear the error — "since the text was holy it was not permissible to add anything to the skeleton of the letters of the Bible," and corrections "even when they were committed to writing... were still not allowed to be introduced into the sacred text."

The same entry documents a named sub-category, sevirin ("there are some who believe…") — variant readings recorded specifically in order to be rejected, "to prevent possible error by the reader." This is a second, independent instance of the same logic inside one system: the tradition records the wrong reading on purpose, beside the text, so a future reader who arrives at the same plausible-looking error can be shown it was already considered and declined, rather than left to re-derive and re-argue it from nothing.

This Tier 2 reading is recorded at that tier on the strength of a named specialist author documenting his own field, per 00-meta/specs/sources.md's rule against a blanket Tier 1 grade for encyclopaedia entries generally — not an upgrade of the venue. It sharpens, rather than duplicates, the vault's existing Talmud print-history cluster: Jacob ben Ḥayyim ibn Adonijah, who compiled the standard printed Masorah, did so as a proofreader in Daniel Bomberg's own Venice shop — the same printing house, one generation after Joshua Solomon Soncino's 1483/84 layout, that the vault's claim-bomberg-1520s-venice-talmud-set-standard-page-layout and claim-soncino-1483-originated-talmud-gemara-rashi-tosafot-layout already track. It is also a textual-tradition sibling to claim-mishnah-eduyot-gives-explicit-reasons-for-recording-rejected-legal-opinions: both traditions state, in their own words, that a superseded or rejected reading stays on the page by design rather than by oversight.