Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Chavoux Luyt <chavoux AT gmail.com>]

Shalom the list

I few recent threads has gone into pretty much detail concerning the rules
of grammar and pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. I know that when learning
English in school it was one of my major frustrations that both the
spelling and the pronunciation was so inconsistent. Why is it "feet"
instead of "foots"? Why is the "ou" in "though", "through" and "thought"
pronounced differently? (There are many more examples). The answer I got
was simply that that was the way English-speaking people speak (and write)
the language. They learn to speak it in certain way, but don't first learn
the "rules" of grammar and spelling and then apply that to learn the
language.

My question is if we are not over-analysing the grammar and especially the
pointing of the tanach? No doubt the different regions in Israel had
different dialects or at least different pronunciations (we evidence of
this in Judges 12:6 (which interesting enough implies that the
pronunciation of Gilead (trans-Jordan) rather than that of Ephraim was the
correct one) up to the time of the New Testament (Mark.14:70 - here
assuming they used Hebrew and not only Aramaic)). Even in modern-day Israel
different pronunciations (in addition to the standard pronunciation) can be
heard and outside Israel the difference between Azkenazi and Sephardic
pronunciations still persists. Does it then make sense to look for "the"
correct pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew (or of the nikkud)?

There was a long discussion on the meaning of katal, yiktol, wekatal and
wayiktol in terms of being indicators of tense, aspect or something else.
Did the ancient Hebrews really think in those linguistic terms? In
Afrikaans it is quite common to relate past events using the present tense
and it is perfectly understandable as having occurred in the past. Is there
any reason that the Hebrews did not do something similar? And are we not
making a mistake to use "counter-examples" to conclude that a certain
"grammatical rule" cannot be true? I cannot conclude from the occasional
use of present tense (usually in a narrative) in Afrikaans for past events
that it is not really the present tense form of the verb. Are we not
confusing ourselves by making the Hebrew Grammar more difficult than it
need to be and are many pronunciations and grammatical "oddities" not
simply indications of how biblical Hebrew was spoken at a specific time and
place? The most important thing is surely to ensure that we understand it
as correctly as possible? Before we draw all kinds of grammatical
conclusions from those occurrences of "curious" language usage we
occasionally encounter.

Best Regards
Chavoux Luyt