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I probably read most in NIV . . . partly because I think it's scholarship is among the better of the newer ones and partly because the pocket version is always with me.

I love THE MESSAGE. My understanding is that it matches the flavor, earthy-ness etc. of the Hebrew and the Greek very closely.

I have a bias that God has been well able to protect the essentials and a lot more quite sufficiently for us to get the best and most important meat out of them

QUITE SUFFICIENTLY to guide our relationship with Him AND with each other AND to guide us to our eternal home.

I'd love to be able to read the Chinese or the Spanish but I'm not close to achieving that yet. I believe other languages flesh out nuances missed in the English.

It's not likely I'll learn Hebrew or Greek in this lifetime though I did study Psalms and Daniel in the Hebrew with scholarly character one year.

I was reared on and memorized great chunks of the KJV. But youth and certainly the Chinese using English as a second language have little to no use for the THEE'S AND THOU's and I don't blame them a bit.

I don't have much patience with the stodgy, sterile, dead English of some versions. I can't even say which ones at present but I don't like them and won't use them.

I have an interlinear somewhere and certainly use a list of translations etc. when I want to get everything I can out of a passage.

And, of course, I've read the AMPLIFIED version through.

But I think being in dialogue with Holy Spirit when one reads is at least as important as the translation. Afterall, God said HE WOULD LEAD US INTO ALL TRUTH.

All the oldest and best manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible contain on every page, beside the Text (which is arranged in two or more colums), a varying number of lines of smaller writing, distributed between the upper and lower margins.

This smaller writing is called the Massorah Magna or Great Massorah, while that in the side margins and between the columns is called the Massorah Parva or Small Massorah.

The word Massorah is from the root "masar", "to deliver something into the hand of another", so as to commit it to his trust. Hence the name is given to the small writing referred to, because it contains information necessary to those into whose trust the Sacred Text was committed, so that they might transcribe it, and hand it down correctly.

The Text itself had been fixed before the Massorites were put in charge of it. This had been the work of the Sopherim (from saphar, to count, or number). Their work, under Ezra and Nehemiah, was to set the Text in order after the return from Babylon; and we read of it in Neh. 8:8 (cp. Ezra 7:6, 11). The men of "the Great Synagogue" completed the work. This work lasted about 110 years, from Nehemiah to Simon the first, 410-300 B.C.

The Sopherim were the authorised revisers of the Sacred Tex; and, their work being completed, the Massorites were the authorised custodians of it. Their work was to preserve it. the Massorah is called "A Fence to the Scriptures," because it locked all words and letters in their places. It does not contain notes or comments as such, but facts and phenomena. It records the number of times the several letters occur in the various books of the Bible; the number of words, and the middle word; the number of verses, and the middle verse; the number of expressions and combinations of words, etc. All this, not from a preverted igenuity, but for the set purpose of safeguarding the Sacred Text, and preventing the loss or misplacement of a single letter or word.

There is more but basically the word was written and then notes added to lock the words and letters in. Protects the Written Word from man's hands.

This comes from the Companion Bible Appendixe 30 The Massorah. Reason I use this Bible is that it aides the student in being able to look up the words used, in the Strong's Concordance