Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> > 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.


Karl, please, could you make clear what are you speaking about? :-)

Namely, are you interested in the exact ancient pronounciation of the Hebrew
in the "biblical times" (if so, why?) or is the meaning/grammatical form
what is important for you?

If you are refferring to the former than yes, you are completely right:
the "vocalization" of the Hebrew Bible changed in the course of time,
but this was mainly due to relatively regular sound shifts.

But if you conclude from this fact that the masoretic vocalization is
"unreliable" or even erroneous _as opposed to the written text_ than
you are completely wrong.

Years ago I started my disertation in an effort to find the "theology"
of the Masoretic text assuming that it were "the Masoretes" who invented
the vocalization of the masoretic codices.

Now I am convinced that all that "the Masoretes" have done was to combine two
(slightly different) textual traditions of the Jewish Hebrew Bible:
the written text (copied by the scribes) and a memorized and orally
studied variant of the same texts. It seems to me that socio-economic
conditions were what caused the two traditions to exist (the high costs of
the writing) and later to be merged at the end of the 1st millenium C.E.
(due to a more accessible literacy at that time and consequently
the decay of the ability to memorize large chunks of texts...).

What I found is that both sources of "our" masoretic codices, i.e. the
written text and the oral tradition are prone to specific transmission
errors - each to its own, so that sometimes the written text is more
reliable but in other cases it is, in turn, the oral tradition that preserved
the text in a better shape.

For example if you find ר instead of ד (or vice versa) it is in the vast 
majority of cases
a scribal error (and many times the oral tradition has the better variant,
i.e. in cases where the two traditions differ - see the qerē/ketīḇ).
On the other hand, phenomena such as harmonization are typical errors that
occur during an oral transmition of the text.

Sometimes even more tricky examples can be found where a scribal error
caused the oral tradition to be "corrected" according to such an erroneous
form creating at the end totally nonsensical form.

In all these cases it doesn't make any sense to ignore the masoretic
vocalization; rather the exact nature of the transmission error should
be considered to decide which of the two traditions is more reliable in
a specific case - or to see whether some sort of "interplay" between the
two traditions may have occured.

Ignoring the masoretic tradition and relying only on the written text
is biased and unscientific and doesn't help in understanding the textual
history of the Hebrew Bible or the development of the Biblical Hebrew itself.

For more see my dissertation (which I reached about a month ago, hoping it
will be accepted): http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek/dis.pdf
(Unfortunatelly, I didn't manage to catch all the errors, so be warned... :-/ 
)

Petr Tomasek

-- 
Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
Jabber: butrus AT jabbim.cz