Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT sil.org]

Rolf wrote: "...But the nature (or value) of patah and shewa led [the 
Masoretes] to use these letters in the way we know without having in 
mind the great semantic difference which were ascribed to the letters 
by the grammarians from the 11th century onward..."

Hold on... Are you, Rolf, saying that the Masoretic pointing dating 
from the 9th-10th centuries (is that correct?) was already 
misunderstood in the 11th century? Is it likely that a text preserved 
and understood for over a millennium suddenly, in just one century, 
became understood in a quite different way i.e. non-past we+yiqtol 
suddenly became understood as past wayyiqtol? What catastrophe took 
place to cause such a loss of traditional understanding?

Peter Kirk