Peter:
But that's just the point. While the number of names that Joel Hoffman presented is small, that the same names have radically different pronunciations calls all the pronunciation schema into question. ...
... Further, none of the pronunciation points nor transliterations were extant when there were still native speakers of Biblical Hebrew to interview. The earliest was generations later. Who knows what changed before.
And I will add to that that even within the tradition of the Masoretic points, it is demonstrable that some of them are wrong. Remember, I gave an example concerning Proverbs 1:19 a while back.
The probability that after 1000 years of war, upheaval, no native speakers, exiles, foreign accents and so forth, that the MT should accurately preserve Biblical pronunciation is a vanishingly small probability. Hence I can confidently claim that the Masoretic points do not reflect Biblical pronunciations.
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