Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 11/8/06, omar nshea wrote:

> then that would undermine the transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into
> Arabic by the Karaites etc and
> their reliablity as sources for the reconstruction of quantity would
> be put into question.

I wanted to add: Tiberian Hebrew is one of several traditions of the
Hebrew Bible.  It is not necessarily the "correct" one, if any one
can be called correct. However, it attained its status in part because
Tiberius was the seat of the Jewish leadership, having been the place
to where the Sanhedrin relocated and the Jerusalem Talmud compiled.
In any case, if one wants to read the Hebrew Bible with the Tiberian
Massorah, one must use the conventions that those same
Massoretes used when compiling their manuscripts.  You can doubt
the Medieval Tiberian sources, but if you do, you're left without either
the grammatical works or their transliterations or their Massorah.

Yitzhak Sapir