Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
In this episode of Hebrew Voices, When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down, Bible Scholar Dr. Nehemia Gordon talks with Dr. Nick Posegay about how diacritical marks became Hebrew vowel points, when did the Masoretes create the vowel symbols, and … Continue reading →
In this episode of Hebrew Voices, When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down, Bible Scholar Dr. Nehemia Gordon talks with Dr. Nick Posegay about how diacritical marks became Hebrew vowel points, when did the Masoretes create the vowel symbols, and whether the Tiberian system preserves Second Temple Hebrew.
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Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Nehemia: I’ve encountered a lot of people who have this idea that originally Hebrew didn't have vowels, and I've even talked to people who say, “Well, we read the ancient Hebrew. There are no vowels.” And I'm like, “Okay, well, I'm pretty sure every spoken language has vowels in it.”
Nehemia: I'm here with Dr. Nick Posegay of Cambridge University. It’s great to be here with you, Nick. You just had this amazing lecture that you presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Conference. We’re here in November of 2021, and it was absolutely fascinating, about the history of the Hebrew vowel system, and particularly the graphic symbols. And you have a book coming out - tell us about the book.
Nick: Yeah, the book is called Points of Contact, and it's about comparing linguistic traditions in the medieval period to the Masoretes; the Hebrew Masoretes are one of those, but also Arabic and Syriac grammatical traditions, and finding relationships and similarities between them, often technical terminology that were shared, or ideas that were shared, as all three traditions figured out different ways to study and record vocalization in the Bible and the Koran.
Nehemia: You had this great example in your lecture where you took Saadia Gaon, who was a 10th century Rabbinical leader, and in his discussion of the Hebrew vowels, he uses terms from an Arabic grammar talking about vowels, and you suggested he probably actually read that grammar.
Nick: Yeah.
Nehemia: So, tell us a little bit about that.
Nick: Well, it's hard to know for sure exactly what people read and what they used to educate themselves, and to grow up in a medieval system of education. Now, in Saadia’s time - he was born in the late 9th century in Egypt - formal education… a lot of it took place in Arabic. So, there's Arabic pedagogy, and Saadia probably grew up speaking Arabic and was well versed in classical Arabic. And we can kind of tell this because he translated the Pentateuch, and he translated it from Hebrew into Arabic, and his Arabic is very good and it's very similar to Classical Arabic.
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Comments
British “aluminium” pronunciation is actually a mispronunciation and does not match the universal spelling. A better example might be “naught” sometimes spoken as “not” and sometimes like “nowt” depending on dialect.
It has long been my theory that the different vowel pointing systems could easily reflect a different accent/pronunciation of words, for instance, as the word “Aluminum” is spoken by an American as compared to a typical British pronunciation of the same word. The Naphtali system may even have represented a Galilean accent, as the Gospel of John records Peter’s speech gave him away as being a Galilean. The Naphtali system was simply abandoned as an overwhelming number of “Tiberian” speakers prevailed.
Sorry i should have proof read that better,, a few mistakes…also should be Torah, not Tenach 🙂 one of my points was the pictographic Hebrew (as far as i know) was never used with vowel pointings 🙂
I am no kind of scholar, but it seems to me .. if the Hebrews were writing pictographic letters in the wilderness with no vowels, then there is a good chance Moses likely recorded the tenach is the the same pictographic letters. what i understood is that the Hebrew letters we use today were influenced by the Aramaic letters… and the vowels came after that. I know secularly the ancient peoples and certainly all “common” peoples were thought to be illiterate and less intelligent than the peoples of today. But anyone who reads the bible even at face value should see a very intelligent people from the beginning. I see no reason why YHVH would not have given Adam a complete language day 1. Certainly if you were to read the the other biblical traditions preflood peoples were very scholarly… writing and passing on writings, that other folks, average folks, could read. And then at the tower of Babel YHVH again stepped in to tweak language, “by family”, into presumably 70 differing languages why would they not be complete languages with Alpha-numerics?
Thank you so much for this! It was excellent, and I can’t wait to read his book. ~Anne Elliott
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