Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Hi Chris,

It actually depends what printed edition you are using. In general, the
phenomenon is called "qeri and ketiv", that is, the masoretic tradition has
a word written (ketiv) one way and read (qeri) another. There are many
reasons for this: in some cases the consonental text was obviously corrupt,
but the masoretes did not want to change it because they considered it
sacred, and so they added a "note" on its "correct" pronunciation. Others
are cases of dittography, haplography or even non-standard orthography,
which the masoretes "corrected".
The older prints, such as BHS, leave the word written as is, with the
"correct" dots suprimposed. More modern prints prefer to leave the original
unvoweled so that the reader immediately knows that something is "wrong",
and supply the traditional vocalizion in the margins.

Yigal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tigran Aivazian" <tigran AT bibles.org.uk>
To: "wattswestmaas" <wattswestmaas AT eircom.net>
Cc: "B-Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 11:39 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Qeri and ketiv readings


> On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, wattswestmaas wrote:
> > Please can someone elucidate what none of my grammar books seem eager to
> > explain and that is WHY are they 'passed over'?
>
> Ah, just re-read your email and I think I see what you are asking (and Isa
> 9:6 was irrelevant, which confused me). Ok, the answer is that the reason
> depends on individual case, i.e. you have to consider all of them, one at
> a time.
>
> This work has been done already and the results are presented on pages
> 315-318 of Ginsburg's Introduction, i.e. for every case.
>
> Generally it is a case of "dittography", i.e. the scribe writing the same
> word twice or an extra word by mistake...
>
> Shalom
> Tigran
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