Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

David:

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 12:19 PM, David Steinberg <
david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com> wrote:

> Karl
> Your statement below is both partially correct and misleading -
>

You are right, I should have written “Masoritic” instead of “modern”. I was
taught in class that the Yeminite pronunciation is the most accurate modern
example of Masoretic pronunciation, hence my reference.

>
> "We don't know what was the original pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew.
> All we have are the consonants, and we don't even agree on the
> pronunciation of those. There are some of us who believe that the modern
> pronunciation (Israeli or Yemini) was how the ancients pronounced Hebrew
> before the Babylonian Exile, others dispute that belief. …
>
>
>
> We cannot recreate the pronunciations (1000 - 350 BCE and many dialects
> and registers(seehttp://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_diglossia.htm  ) of
> Biblical Hebrew with certainty however:
>

So here you agree with me.

>
> a) we can reconstruct the Tiberian pronunciation with some confidence (
> http://www.adath-shalom.ca/history_of_hebrew2a.htm#vowel_systemTH nb.
> footnotes);
>

I don’t consider the Tiberian pronunciation “Biblical Hebrew”.


> c) we do have a clear view of the range of the likely pronunciations of
> the BH consonants …
>

Did the “bgdkpt” letters have one or multiple pronunciations during
Biblical times? Were the sin and shin originally one letter with one
pronunciation during Biblical times, or two letters combined into one
grapheme? We see that the Samekh and Sin had distinctive pronunciations in
Judges, but were interchanged in Ezra indicating that they possibly had one
pronunciation then. No, there is still some disagreement on the
pronunciation of at least some of the consonants. That does not mean that
we are clueless, rather that questions that cannot be answered remain.

>
> No one can read or pronounce or even understand the text ( see
> http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_5.htm#orth )without assuming a
> vocalization.
>

For the record, I largely still use the vowel pronunciations for the
different forms as were used by the Masoretes, but that is only to help
with reading the text. I make no claim that those pronunciations are
accurate for Biblical times. In this, I am using those pronunciations the
same way as Egyptologists, as mentioned by Will Parsons.

>
> David Steinberg
>
> Ottawa, Canada
>
> Leonard Book:

When we take Biblical Hebrew words in context, the contextual clues almost
never leave us in doubt as to what type of word we are dealing with (I
can’t think of a single example). Hence the misreadings you mention are
either deliberate, or from poor understanding of the text.

Karl W. Randolph.