Biblical Hebrew Forum

["JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.apu.ac.uk>]

Thanx for your research Harold. Very enlightening! So 
it seems that they date back to at least Masoretic
times then, eh? But surely the Masoretes would only 
have made a point of putting the spaces there if they 
believed them to be an integral and/or significant 
part of the text? Does anyone know what the testimony 
of our most ancient fragment say?

Hang on a minute. I've just had a flick through my 
dead sea scroll Isaiah photocopy and while I can't see 
any pe's or empty lines there does seem to be many 
occasions where the rest of a line is left blank. Even 
multiple times on the same 'page'. Do the Isaiah blank 
spaces from the dead sea scrolls correspond to the 
Masoretic Isaiah spacings?

-----Original Message-----
From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 15:50:47 -0500
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Pe in the aleppo codex

Dear James,

>Thanks for the explanations guys. So, if I understand 
>correctly, a theoretical 'original' version of the 
>completed text would have had no 'pe' at the end of 
>each open verse but rather a line of space in its
>place?
>  
>

HH: I have learned from Marvin Sweeney's Hermeneia commentary on 
Zephaniah that the biblical system of "open section lines (petuchah) and 
"closed section" lines (setumah) was a Masoretic convention. Therefore, 
it says nothing about what the original document from the hand of Isaiah 
would have looked like. The open section lines marked off a large 
structural division in the text, and the closed section lines indicated 
a structural subdivision within a larger petuchah. However, the 
Masoretes were not always consistent in their use of this system. 
Perhaps that is one reason why printed editions of rabbinic Bibles 
(Miqra'ot Gedolot) do not even use petuchah and setumah.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard


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