This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer.
22 July 2022 index-topical-hb
The Hebrew alphabet is the alphabet of the Hebrew language. In its original form, it consisted solely of consonants. Below are equivalents that were used on biblicalambiguities.net.
ʔ b/v g d h w z ḥ ṭ y k l m n s ʕ p/f ṣ q r š/ś t
The letters are named ʾaleph, bet, gimel, dalet, he, vav, zayin, het, tet, yod, kaph, lamed, mem, nun, samekh, ʿayin, pe, tsaddi, qof, resh, shin, tav.
If English worked on the principle of an abjad, we would write 'roast' as rst. We would also use rst for 'wrist', 'Rasta', 'reset', 'rest', 'arrest', 'russet', 'roost', and maybe even 'eraced', 'arsed', and 'raced', if we're being phonetic.
You see the problem? Because the Bible is written in consonants, sometimes you can't tell what word you're looking at. At some point, before the Masoretic Text reached its final form, people started using some consonants for vowels. So h at the end of a word can be an h, or an ah vowel. A y can be an i or an e vowel. A w can be an o or an u.
Now roast, wrist, Rasta, reset, rest, arrest, russet, roost, eraced, arsed, and raced are rwst, rst, rsth, ryst, rst, rst, rwst, yryst, rst, and ryst. Now, that helps. But there's still some ambiguity. rwst is roast and roost; rst is rest and arrest; and so on.
Even later, in the second half of the first millennium CE, people added little dots, nequdot, above and below the letters, to indicate how words were pronounced. So if you see someone transliterating, say, the first letter of Genesis as bereshit bara elohim et ha-shamayim v'et ha'aretz, those vowels are from the nekudot. The usual practice today is to translate forms as supplied by the nekudot, deviating only from time to time when the context seems to demand it.
But it's important to remember that these vowels aren't those of the Bible in its earlier forms; they're a medieval guess, written by some very good but not perfect guessers. Or, more precisely, they are the result of a long oral tradition, but given a long enough oral tradition, they are for all practical purposes educated guesses. On this site, whenever you see me filling out a Hebrew word with vowels, remember -- they're not an explicit part of the pre-medieval text.
Two interesting points of comparison for the vowels are the proper names found in the Septuagint, and similar data in the Vulgate, both translations from Hebrew made before the establishment of the written Masoretic vowel-points.
Broadly speaking, the Hebrew alphabet comes in two basic forms, leaving aside the so-called cursive script. In the oldest forms of the language, a script known as Paleo-Hebrew dominated. Later the ashuri or square script was borrowed from Aramaic, and continues to be the basis of virtually all printed Hebrew materials to this day, and is used on handwritten scrolls of the Hebrew Bible. In the Qumran scrolls, some materials are in the square script and some in the paleo script, as the language was in transition from the one to the other.
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