Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kirk Lowery <Kirk AT GrovesCenter.org>]

On 02/15/11 08:13, Berel Beyer wrote:

> 3. My guess is that the distinctions developed for either or both of 
> the following reasons: to make writing quicker and simpler (like the 
> development of minuscule lettering with the Roman alphabet), or to 
> distinguish between orthographically similar letters (*something*
> like the development of j, to distinguish between the consonant and
> the vowel).

My guess is that they were developed for manuscripts where the words had
no or very little space between them, and there would be ambiguity about
which word a letter belonged to. The sofit letters would make the word
division unambiguous. Of course, it would be an interpretation of the
scribe at some point; this could be useful in textual criticism of the
text as one tries to reconstruct how a textual variant came about.

Blessings,

Kirk
--
Kirk E. Lowery, PhD, President & Senior Research Fellow
The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research
http://www.GrovesCenter.org
--
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