Biblical Hebrew Forum

[leonard book <lbook AT 013net.net>]

One cannot ignore what, according to Maimonides, has become the only
acceptable vocalisation - even if it was from the Tiberian Masorete school
of Aaron ben Asher. Jews, through the centuries, have been demonized owing
to incorrect vocalisation, for example when Moses descended the mountain
(Ex: 34:29) his face was radiant - KaRaN, lit: giving off rays, whereas some
read it as KeReN, i.e. he came down with horns, therefore, Jews are the sons
of the devil! Even one dot changes the whole meaning of the verse.  Numbers
7:89, Moses "would hear the Voice speaking to him", which then continues,
"and He spoke to him." Without the Mesorah we would have read, 'medaber',
instead of 'midaber', a contraction of 'mitdaber' - reflexive. The 'taf' is
often omitted when a word whose first root letter is 'daled' or 'tet,' as
in, 'mitaher', condensed from 'mit-taher. The first root letter then takes a
dogesh, i.e Moses heard (or overheard) God speaking to Himself! (See Rashi
and also on Ex: 33:9.)

Besides the vocalization, the question of what type of Hebrew writing was in
use at the time of Sinai, was it Ivrit - Hebrew or Ashuri -Assyrian? De
Rossi states that when the Messiah arrives, only then will we have the true
answer.
It is no small wonder that the early rabbis declared a Fast day when the
Torah was first translated into a foreign tongue.

Leonard E. Book

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of David Steinberg
Sent: 28 December 2011 02:15
To: Will Parsons; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vocalization and reading of Biblical Hebrew


Will
Thanks for your comment.  I do not know how many homographs, assumed to
stand for phonologically distinct words, exist in Egyptian. Since vocalized
Coptic is very late Egyptologists may have no choice in how they handle the
language. However, in Hebrew we have multiple streams of evidence (vowel
letters; Amarna Canaaanite; Greek transcriptions; Palestinian, Babylonian,
and Tiberian pointing; modern pronunciation traditions; closely cognate
languages - Aramaic/Syriac, Arabic etc) which often enable us to
convincingly reconstruct a chain of pronunciation developments from
Proto-Semitic through Biblical Hebrew to Tiberian Hebrew. It is therefore
gratuitous to ignore all this evidence and pretend that we have no idea of
the original BH vocalization(s).

Take a look at <DBR> http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_5.htm#orth . 
Most of the distinctive MT vocalizations of <DBR> can easily be traced back
to distinctive reconstructed PS and probable BH forms. So does it really
make sense to ignore vowels that are probable and to pretend that every
instance of <DBR> is simply a hompgraph that might stand for "he spoke", "it
was said", "thing/word", "cattle plague" etc.?

David Steinberg

Ottawa, Canada

To pronounce any language one must use vowels, but it's not necessary to
assume a vocalization. Egyptologists do this all the time (perforce, since
Egyptian does not indicate vowels and there is no equivalent for the
Massoretic vowel points). So, an Egyptian word transcribed (slightly
simplifying) <sdmf> (approx. "he hears") is conventionally pronounced
/sedemef/, where the various e's have been inserted simply for the purposes
of making the word pronounceable, but with no illusions that this is how the
word was actually pronounced by Egyptians. I personally would not take this
approach to the Biblical text, but Karl has indicated many times that he
regards the Massoretic vowel pointing to be so frequently wrong as to prefer
to ignore it. Even if you don't agree with this assessment, I don't think
it's completely unreasonable, and if one does so, one can readily apply the
approach taken by Egyptologists to Hebrew.
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