Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 23/02/2006 01:54, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> ...
>
> You wrote: "there is no way of telling from inscriptional Hebrew which
> final he's are pronounced and which are silent."  Now that is an
> interesting statement.  Why would you insist that we have no way of
> telling only which final he's are pronounced?  What about medial
> he's?  How do we know that they are pronounced?  We may ask
> the same of any letter and dispute the transliteration into Greek as a
> different dialect than the primary one.  How do we know if final n's
> are silent or pronounced, for example?  In my opinion, unless it is
> possible to show that a particular final he must have been silent,
> there is no reason to believe otherwise.  This doesn't just apply
> to pre-exilic times.  It applies to post-exilic times as well.  It applies
> to the spelling of the Torah and to the rest of the Bible.  It applies to
> Qumran.  But each of these must be tested within their own spelling
> convention.  It goes for any letter, not just final he, of course.
>
>   
There are two answers here. The first is that we have (barring 
occasional debatable descriptions) no real way of telling how any 
ancient text was pronounced. But we have to go on what clues that we 
have, which include more modern pronunciations of the same language and 
related languages. I would accept that as a general principle we should 
assume that letters were pronounced unless there is evidence that they 
were not. But for the final he's there is good evidence to suggest that 
they or most of them were not pronounced, in the Masoretic and modern 
Hebrew pronunciation, in the Arabic pronunciation of cognates, and in 
Greek, Latin etc transliterations which never attempt to reproduce the 
final he but consistently transliterate as if these words ended in vowels.

You claim that the same rule applies to pre-exilic, post-exilic, 
biblical and Qumran Hebrew. I agree that very likely it does. But then I 
claim that for the same reason the same probably rule still applied to 
Masoretic Hebrew, at least in the absence of evidence to the contrary. 
The implication is that most final he's were silent.


> ...
> EHO: (t - "(at" ["now"], a colloquial form, corresponding to the longer 
> literary
> word, (attah.  There can be no doubt that the final accented a would have been
> indicated in the orthography as it is regularly after the 10th century in all
> Hebrew inscriptions. ...

Thank you for these extracts. And how exactly would this final accented 
a have been indicated in the orthography? With a he? If so, Cross and 
Friedman are agreeing with me that in pre-exilic Hebrew final he may 
represent a final accented a and not necessarily an h consonant.

> ...
>
> The above indicates some of the curiousities of the work.  The word (atta 
> "now"
> is seen by Cross and Friedman to have no final vowel because there is no
> final he in the pre-exilic spelling.  They assert this on the basis
> that final vowels
> were always written in the Hebrew orthography.  But this example forms one of
> many others that are supposed to lead to the conclusion whether or not final
> vowels were used.  The same can be said for the relatively similar examples
> in Phoenician and Moabite ")nk" and "aby".  They even recognize the original
> consonantal force of the he in feminine singular words.  Yet they assert (in 
> the
> discussion of "now") that final a must have always been written down.
>   

I accept that this conclusion might be unsafe if there was not clear 
evidence in the Hebrew Bible that separate forms `at and `ata existed. 
The alternative would hypothesise that the alternative forms were `ata 
and `atah. That is of course possible.

Look, Yitzhak, I don't claim to be an expert here. But my account of 
ancient Hebrew pronunciation is the standard scholarly one as presented 
by Cross and Friedman. If you wish to challenge their conclusions, take 
the matter up with them or in proper scholarly journals, not with me.

> ...
> And if you want to doubt m.l. before the 9th century, well then, you are
> now disputing Cross and Friedman's analysis which is essentially what
> you said all scholars "know" except me. ...

I am not sure what I said which disagrees with Cross and Friedman, but I 
bow to their superior knowledge.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/