Jim -***
Thanks for sharing with the list what I intended to post publicly but
carelessly sent only to you.
I fully recognize that "a thousand years or more" for the Masoretic oral
tradition only gets us back to the late first millennium or so. But I was
being needlessly conservative, I think. The Torah had a reading history
going back at least to the time of Ezra, 1500 years before the Masoretes; as
you noted, parts of the written text might plausibly have been written as
early as the 14 century BCE, and I imagine it was a recited text and not
strictly one to be read.
shifted over that time, even in a text with a continuous reading tradition***
about how to pronounce the text. I think that type of shift is a more
plausible case to make than noting that the Masoretic pointing was only
fixed in the Middle Ages. Quite true, but that pointing fixed a much much
earlier tradition of pronunciation, so I think we must look to how
pronunciation might have shifted rather than to the relatively late date of
the Masoretes' contributions in assessing what the Hebrew reflects. I'm
sure the Ugaritic spelling may be more relevant to tell us how the name of
the king was originally pronounced, assuming we have a strong case for how
Ugaritic was pronounced; but it seems to me that the late date of the
Masoretes' fixing their pointing may be something of a red herring.
Lewis Reich
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.