Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Petr Tomasek <tomasek AT etf.cuni.cz>]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 09:37:58PM -0400, Ken Penner wrote:
> Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> 
> > I 
> > am not sure how you go about deciding that the vocalization 
> > tradition is somehow not as earlier as the consonantal text.  
> 
> I would think such things as perpetual Qere, the vocalization of the 
> Tetragrammaton, and the vocalization of Qal Passives as Puals would 
> indicate the vowel points are not as ancient as the consonantal text. My 
> work with Qumran texts has increased my confidence in the antiquity of the 
> consonants of the MT and decreased my confidence in the antiquity of the 
> vowels.
> 
> Ken

I think You are wrong in that You don't diferrentiate between
the "vocal points" and the "reading tradition (i.e. an oral tradition!).

The "points" are certainly not older than (say) 4th-5th century CE.
And there is a clear evidence from the babylonian and palestinian
punctuation, that there were different dialects of the way how the Tanakh
was read which developed in the time.

However this alone is not a proof against the antiquity of
that oral tradition; it's only an evidence for the fact
that the phonetic tradition of reading the Bible did
evolve.


-- 
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
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