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.
23 July 2022
A mater lectionis (plural, matres lectionis) is in Latin, literally, "mother of reading"). It represents the earliest effort to deal with the vowel problem posed by Hebrew's status as an abjad.
So, for example, without the use of matres, the Hebrew bat melekh ("daughter of the king") and beit melekh ("house of the king") would both be spelled bt mlk. However, by the use of y to represent the ei vowel, we can distunguish them: bt is bat, and byt is beit.
It is important to note that the matres as we find them in the Masoretic Text do not necessarily reflect what would have appeared in the earliest forms of the Hebrew Bible's various works. At Qumran, for example, there are many manuscripts which show matres in different places to where the current Hebrew text has them.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
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