But first, I want to explain my use of the term "Masorites".
Masorites
Mesorah is the Hebrew word for "tradition", and so, those in the second half of the first century CE who established, traditionally, what collections/"books" should be included in the Tanach (Old Testament) with edits that seem to differ from the Septuagint (LXX) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) on occasion. They also established the traditional pronunciations and vowel points were invented to maintain these traditional ways of pronouncing the words in the text.
Here is an example of how different the DSS, MT, and LXX texts can get (click on the image to enlarge):
As you can see, the so-called "word of God" is quite fluid!
There was also another group prior to that, about 2,400 years ago, that I sometimes refer to as "Masorites" as well, and that tends to confuse people. These were the folks who took the oral folklore and gave it a written form, and in doing so, decided what texts would compose a particular book, and what order the texts would appear in the book. There are many books that they assembled that the later Masorites rejected. There is a term, "Men of the Great Assembly", who appear in Jewish legends to have been doing similar work at that time, but the legends surrounding them are unlikely to be historically accurate, and so I hesitate to use that term.
So in order to make things a bit more clear, I will be using "pre-Masorites" when speaking of the BCE group, and the "Masorites" when speaking of the CE group.
So let's look at the texts:
Texts
16:1 - "And Korach took..." - the verb "took" is without a connected object, and so, in essence, is incomplete. There are a number of interpretations to insert what he took, but all of them are simply attachments to the text. The LXX omits this error by not including the verb "and-he-took". The Aramaic Targum simply replaced the word with "and-he-separated-himself" in the reflexive form to make it work better. This problem could simply be that a scribe liked the matching sounds of "Koch" (took) and "Korach".
16:5 - "In the morning, Yahweh will..." makes no sense. Primarily, because the prepositional prefix "in the" (ב) is missing from the actual text. The word is also spelled defectively, meaning, instead of B-O-K-R it is spelled B-K-R (בקר vs בוקר). Now, this is not a problem in and of itself, because defective spelling is quite common. (For example, "David" is sometimes spelled with three letters, and sometimes four). The problem is when you pronounce the word as if it's a noun ("morning") instead of a past-tense-masculine-verb ("he-did-investigate" which is modified to the future tense by the "vav-conversive" (verb-tense-swapping mechanic) that follows "Yahweh".)
The letters "B-K-R" was declared to be pronounced as the noun "boker" by Masorites, those who determined the vowel-sounds of the individual words about 2,400 years ago. But if you pronounce it as the verb "bikeir" with different vowel sounds (using a chirek and a tzeirei instead of a cholam and a segol), then it means "Yahweh will investigate...", which is the word that the LXX used. It appears that those who put together the LXX correctly used the verb form, while the later Masorites incorrectly used the noun form.
And if you read the classic commentaries on "In the morning", you will see the effort that many used to tell a story that was based on a word that was incorrectly interpreted. Interestingly enough, the Aramaic Targum changes "morning" to "in the morning" to fit the traditional Rabbinical view.
16:7 - "he shall be the-holy" - The Torah often prefixes words with the letter hey (ה) which often means "the". The Aramaic Targum and the LXX will usually ignore these.
16:15 - "...I never took an-ass from...". There are two letters that look similar, the resh (ר) and the dalet (ד), and apparently the scribes often wrote one when they meant to write the other, most likely from reading the original and not noticing the minor difference, which is why the problem is typically the "R" replacing the "D". The Hebrew word for donkey/ass is chamor, while replacing the "R" with a "D", makes it "anything-desirable". This is how the LXX reads it, rather than "ass".
"...I never took anything desirable, one from them." This is another problem with the Masoretic vowels, by pronouncing אחד as echad instead of achad (having a patach under the first letter instead of segol). If pronounced as the latter, as the Targum and the LXX does, it means "from any one of them" instead of "one from them".
16:18 - "...at the Tent of Meeting opening...". Here, "the" is missing as a prefix (the opposite with the 16:7 problem), and the Targum and LXX (and other translations) will insert it.
17:2, 17:4 - "...burned". In the first instance, the single form (haserifah) is used, and in the second, the plural form (haserufim) is used. Most translations and the Targum avoid this problem by treating the text as though both are plural forms.
17:6 - "...you caused the death of the nation!" Because of the use of an object identifier, את, this verse would normally be read as Moses killing everyone. That obviously didn't happen. The use of a "מ" prefix of "ahm" (nation) would have corrected that problem, and most Targums and translations treat it as such.
17:14 - The procedures for the writing of the Torah, which includes open and closed sections of the text were established by the Masorites. While the open-text, that indicates a new story is at 17:14, most agree that this is an error, since a new story begins at 17:16. Here is an example what an open paragraph looks like from a different page (notice the blank spot in the midst of words just below the pointer):
17:28 - "Everyone who approaches, who approaches the Tabernacle...". This is likely a scribal repetition error.
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