Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "Jason Hare" <jason AT hareplay.com> =====
>In the Tiberian system, the Shurek is *always* a long vowel. I think that
>the "Shurek is nothing more than a Kubutz" statement may be more true of
>later Hebrew (Qumran, Mishnaic, Modern Ivrit), but in the Classical period
>this was not the case... so far as I've read. Perhaps I'm wrong (and that's
>quite possible), but I was under the impression that the Shurek is *never*
>short in Biblical/Classical Hebrew. Thus, you will NEVER find the Shuruk
>used in a pu'al form where the middle radical is doubled. If it is found, I
>think it can be granted that it is a later text. I would like to know,
>however, if I am just completely off-base on this.

What I think you may be overlooking here is the way the Tiberian-pointed MT 
arose. The Masoretes did not insert consonants into the text itself. (If they 
felt the need to do so, they did it with K/Q in the margin.) So whether a vav 
was present or not was beyond their control. All they could do is point 
accordingly. (There are cases, incidentally, where a Qere has a shurek, and 
the pointing uses a kubutz simply because there is no vav present in the 
written text. This shows an interchangeability of the two u-vowels, at least 
in one direction.) Now, due to the orthographic stage represented by the 
consonantal text, vav was generally present where a long-u or long-o sound 
belonged. The reason is that the matres lectionis seem to have developed in 
part from historical writing of contractions. Where an originally present 
vav-consonant had undergone contraction to produce a long vowel, the vav was 
still written as a historical spelling, which gave rise to the use of a vav 
to 
mark long-u/o, whether it arose from contraction or not. When the Masoretes 
did their work, they simply marked that the vav was indicating an u-vowel or 
o-vowel by adding an appropriate dot. If an u-vowel belonged where there was 
no vav, they used three dots below the consonant. (I should add that 
personally, I don't think the Masoretes ever intentionally marked vowel 
length. There were seven vowels with seven distinct signs and seven distinct 
sounds, and alternate ways of marking the presence of a vowel when a mater 
already stood in the text.)

Now, when we come to the conjunction before b, m, p, or any consonant 
followed 
by shva, what would the Masoretes have found in the text? Precisely the same 
thing they would have found in any other use of the conjunction--a vav. The 
way they read BH (which was not the only way to read it; cf. Babylonian 
pointed texts), the conjunction in these clearly defined circumstances was to 
be read as /u/. Whether it was a short-u or long-u (irrelevant, as I say, to 
the Masoretes), they had to mark an u-vowel at the beginning of the word. 
Since the vav was present and was not to be pronounced, it could only be 
treated as marking the vowel. They added a dot, as they would in any other 
case where a vav coincided with an u-vowel. All of this pertains to the 
orthography, not the language. I think Peter was probably on the right track 
in his explanation of how the u-pronunciation arose in the first place. But 
for the Masoretes, the only concern was that it was pronounced that way, and 
they needed to mark it in the text, which already had a vav. So the presence 
of the vav tells us nothing about the length of the vowel in this case. It 
only tells us that the conjunction is always written as vav, regardless of 
how 
it's pronounced.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics