Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 12/25/06, kenneth greifer wrote:
> Steve,
>
> If you are saying that the Masoretic writers changed the holem in Isaiah in
> those quotes from a vav with a dot over it to a dot only, how do you know if
> they also changed it in Haggai 2:7? Maybe Haggai 2:7 had a dot over the vav
> originally, and they wrote it with a dot only. Maybe people who change the
> word to plural in Haggai 2:7 are actually writing it the way the Dead Sea
> Scroll writers would have written it. (I hope I understood what you said in
> your email, and this answer makes sense to you.)

From the Massoretic point of view, there is no real difference between a
holam with only a dot, and a holam with a waw.  In fact, in the earlier
case, a holam with only a dot was viewed as having a "hidden" waw,
and in both cases, the waw was viewed as a silent letter that
completed a syllable.

From a textual point of view, as I said before, the word xɛmdat in
Haggai 2:7 and the additional "kɔl-haggoyim" appear to me to be
probably an early textual variant of ")ɛt-kɔl-haggoyim" that appears
earlier in the verse.  I think reading a plural feminine here is
forcing it.

The Massoretic texts, with all the vowel system they imply, are not
older than the DSS.  While they are important witnesses, especially
to the consonantal text, some changes in the consonantal text
could and probably did occur later than the DSS.  The claim "The
Masoretic texts could be older, even if we don't have copies of it that
are older than the Dead Sea Scrolls" is circular reasoning.  We do
have some texts that are very similar to the Massoretic text.  There
are, in many cases, still some differences.

Yitzhak Sapir