Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Garth Grenache <garthgrenache AT hotmail.com>]

What you have said is good, James! :)

There is value in reading the text without vowel points and considering other 
possible interpretations where the pointing is ambiguous.  Jewish synagogue 
scrolls are typically unpointed.

Also reading other pointings(e.g. Babylonian), and hearing the Samaritan 
reading would also be of value, as would reading ancient Greek and Latin 
transliterations.

But the analogy of the MT points to training wheels on a bike or arm floats 
for learning to swim is naturally limited.  Arm floats and training wheels 
can be (and are) safely rejected once one is ready to swim/ride without them: 
such things have completely fulfilled their purpose and are now useless and a 
hindrance to movement.  But the MT points remain valuable, as you say: 
attesting at least one ancient tradition of vocalisation of the text -showing 
how at least one stream of people was reciting the text at a period in time.  
They not only show how the text might be vocalised, but they evidence an 
ancient vocalisation when we might be caught between several modern ideas of 
how it could be vocalised.  They are not the only evidence, or the only 
tradition, but they are ancient evidence.

On the other hand, emendation is sometimes necessary not only to the vowel 
points, but also to the consonantal text.  There are places where loss of 
words from the consonantal text has left the grammar unsatisfactory, 
regardless of how it be vocalised.

Kind regards,
Garth, Australia.


Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 13:47:24 +0300
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Masoretic vowels -a good starting point.
From: jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com
To: garthgrenache AT hotmail.com
CC: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

I didn't read your whole email because you started out with showing a 
complete misunderstanding of the general points raised.
Of course in most cases the vowel points of the MT will indicate a correct 
reading (ignoring issues about pronunciation but focussing on disambiguation 
of ambiguous consonant sequences). 

The basic point is that you learn what you practise. If you practise riding a 
bike with stabilisers you learn how to ride a bike with stabilisers. If you 
practise swimming with arm floats you learn how to swim with arm floats. 
Obviously, the vast majority of learners feel more comfortable with these 
kind of stepping stones to the final goal of being able to ride a bike 
without stabilisers or being able to swim with floats wrapped around your 
arms. However, using the MT vowel points as a stepping stone has both 
advantages and disadvantages.

The major disadvantage is that most are never likely to leave the stepping 
stone to the final goal of reading the text unpointed and in fact never do. 
The second disadvantage is that of those who do leave the stepping stone they 
are less likely to make intuitive disambiguations because of having read the 
text so many times pointed that they expect a certain interpretation and 
don't engage logical disambiguation when reading the text (this is not true 
of everyone, of course, I'm being very over general).

The clear advantage to learning to read Hebrew unpointed from the very 
beginning is that readers can learn the ambiguity of forms from the very 
beginning and learn to depend on the context from the very beginning. This is 
not to say that their understanding of the text will automatically be 
superior as a result but you are more likely to engage natural processes of 
logical disambiguation in this way.


So please understand the general points raised before misrepresenting those 
that raise them and label them negatively and inaccurately as 'point 
rejectors'.
I am not aware of any so called 'point rejectors'. The points are a very 
important phenomenon which give us an accurate understanding of how one group 
of scribes understood the text at a particular time in the history of the 
transmission of the text. Such lines of evidence are, unquestionably, a vital 
element of a critical analysis of the various traditions of the text.

However, if you practise that one tradition you learn that one tradition and 
close your critical toolset to be based on that one tradition. Not entirely, 
the best 'scholarly approach' in the view of myself and others. You are, of 
course, perfectly free to disagree just as you are perfectly free to be 
blatantly and quite clearly wrong.

In summary, I hope you have understood that encouraging reading Hebrew 
unpointed is not so much an attack against the Massoretic tradition so much 
as intended to give students of Hebrew a better critical apparatus to build 
their understanding on.

James Christian
                                          
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