Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down

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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.

Nehemia: In fact, the Christians in the Middle East, if I'm not mistaken, used Saadia’s… who was a Jew, they use his Arabic translation of the Old Testament, of the Tanakh, to this very day.

Nick: Some do, yeah.

Nehemia: Which is incredible.

Nick: That’s very good.

Nehemia: So, apparently, he was an expert at Arabic, which he spoke fluently, and he's using Arabic terms to describe Hebrew vowels. And so, your book is looking at the Hebrew vowel system, the Arabic vowel system, and the Syriac vowel system.

Nick: Right.

Nehemia: And the points of contact, and that's a pun.

Nick: It is a pun, yeah.

Nehemia: Because they're dots, points. In Hebrew we call it nikud, or nekudot - which are dots. So, a lot of people in my audience, they've heard about the Bible and Hebrew, and 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.”

You're coming at this as an academic who studied these different cultures and different languages, and really, you’re a linguist. Would that be fair to say?

Nick: Linguist and historian, bits of both.

Nehemia: Okay, so talk to me about what did Hebrew have before the vowels were written down?

Nick: Hebrew, before the vowels were written down, is more or less the Hebrew that we know. Biblical Hebrew, once the vowels are written down, is recording, essentially, the Hebrew that was spoken before. So, when we say that there were no vowels, when people say that they really mean that there were no vowel points, because those weren't invented until the medieval period. And the consonants, the consonants of the Bible, were written thousand years before that.

Nehemia: Let's start with this term that you threw out - Masoretes. Who were the Masoretes?

Nick: The Masoretes were a group, or several groups, of scholars in the medieval period, mostly between the 8th, 10th, and into the 11th centuries, who sat down and figured out how to record the spoken tradition of Biblical Hebrew, how they were pronouncing Biblical Hebrew when they read it in synagogue, because before that time there were no dots. So, you could see the consonantal text, but you would read the vocalization from memory, because presumably the person reading would know the text.

Nehemia: So, the Masoretes invented a system to record the vowels that were already spoken and transmitted, right?

Nick: Exactly.

Nehemia: They didn't invent the vowels… or did they? Did they invent vowels?

Nick: No, no.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nick: No, the vowels are already there, and they were part of a tradition that goes back centuries, of how to pronounce the vowels in each of those words. It's just that nobody had written them down.

Nehemia: And that's a really important point.

So, one of the ideas that I've heard discussed in literature, or read about in literature, is that it's not that there was a way to pronounce a certain word, but sometimes there was a way to pronounce a certain word in a specific verse, and that same word in a different book… the example that someone once brought to me is, the Hebrew word for a certain type of stone, which is barkat. And in Exodus… I forget which one it is, in Exodus, its barkat, and in the other one it’s bareket. And it's consistent throughout the manuscripts that in Exodus it has one vocalization, and in Ezekiel, I think, it has the other vocalization. The way it's usually explained is there were these professional readers, and they memorized the reading of every word - the entire passages of course - and so what the Masoretes did is they wrote down what had already been preserved and transmitted orally, essentially is what you’re saying.

Nick: Yeah. And some of these inconsistencies that you're pointing out, like when one word may be pronounced differently in one book from another book, these can be clues that what the Tiberian Masoretes were recording is actually a very ancient system, because they had these inconsistencies, but they were already ingrained, “This is tradition, we have to preserve it.”

Nehemia: How ancient?

Nick: There is evidence that some aspects of the Tiberian tradition are preserving features of Second Temple Hebrew. And we can find some of this, like we just saw, through Greek transcriptions of Hebrew from the 1st and 2nd century CE. They preserve features of Hebrew that we see in the later Tiberian tradition. So, there are some aspects - scholars debate how much of the tradition is exactly preserved - but it seems like they were following an ancient tradition that they knew very well and were concerned with recording it properly.

Nehemia: So, when we open up a Hebrew Bible today, if you go online and you see a Bible and you see the vowel points, those are Tiberian points.

Nick: Those are Tiberian points. So, the Tiberian system - at least the dots that we see in a Bible today, when you open up your Bible - are not really attested before the 8th or 9th century in manuscripts, so we know that they were invented around that time. There are earlier manuscripts that have what's called the Palestinian or Land of Israel tradition, and it is a different set of points, and instead of what we know, that there's vowel points above and below, these were all placed above the line of Hebrew text. And there are some indications that it's related to Syriac pointing, but it's not totally firm, the connections, because there’s very little manuscript evidence and evidence of how that would have happened. It’s hard to tell.

Nehemia: Can I point out a mythological problem here?

Nick: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, we don't really have manuscripts… we certainly don't have codex’s from before the 8th century… I don’t even know if we have any from the 8th century. We definitely have 9th century codices, so we don't know for sure. I'm suggesting, and you can disagree with me, we don't know for sure exactly when they were written down because we don't have evidence for one way or another. In other words, it's not like we have this naked codex from the 6th century; we have scrolls, but scrolls never had accents or vowels, with some few exceptions - is that fair to say?

Nick: Yeah, this is a good point…

Nehemia: So, then what would make you think it is from let's say, the 8th century?

Nick: The Tiberian, you mean?

Nehemia: Yeah, the Tiberian.

Nick: Well, as I talked about today in the lecture, I think there is a definite connection between the perception of vowels and where they're pronounced inside the mouth. The back of the mouth is considered high, the front of the mouth is considered low, and this was how Masoretes described vowel phonology, because if it's not written down you have to find a way to talk about it.

That idea, as I mentioned, probably comes from the Syriac grammatical tradition, which was active in the 7th century using similar terminology and similar descriptions, and they did have dots prior to the 8th century. They had a diacritic dot that is first attested in the 4th or 5th century, probably.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nick: Now, this is not a vowel dot exactly, but it evolved into the vowel dots.

Nehemia: You said, “a diacritic dot.” Explain for the audience, who may not be linguists, what diacritics are.

Nick: It's a little dot that indicates something about how you should pronounce a certain word. If you place it above a word, it might mean something, and below a word might mean something else.

Nehemia: Let’s back up a second here. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, and like Hebrew, it's written essentially as all consonants. Maybe it's a little simplistic, because you have matres lectionis… let's not get into that, but primarily it's written as a series of consonants. Hebrew has 22 consonants; I believe Syriac has as well. Arabic has more consonants. And so, if you've three letters - you brought the example of a Samech-Pey-Reish, which could be sefer, safar, it could be sipper, it could be supar, it could be lots of different things, and so if I'm understanding you correctly, in the Syriac - and I read your article too, I'm cheating here - when they wanted to distinguish between two words with the same consonants, they would put a dot to indicate which of those words it is. Right?

Nick: Right, and they decided to place the dot either above or below one of these words, and we call them homographs; so, homograph, meaning "same written." So written the same way. A dot above a word indicated that this was the homograph with the vowels pronounced farthest back in the mouth, OH, AH, UH, and then a dot below indicates a homograph with vowels pronounced farther forward in the mouth, AY, EE. So that's how Syriac scribes tended to designate with a diacritic dot above or below.

Nehemia: Yeah, and one of the fascinating things you brought is those terms of above and below, which are not intuitive, they're not obvious, at least to me, that there are Jewish sources that use those same exact terms, apparently, with a similar meaning… that shows the connection.

Nick: Yeah, we can talk about that, but it does get pretty technical.

Nehemia: We don't want to get too technical here. Let's talk about this issue, because you talked about authoritative. And there is this debate that goes back about 500 years, about the origin, and this is within Jewish sources even, about how far back the vowels go, in graphic form. And there were some rabbis, even in the 19th… and certainly, there's modern rabbis, of course, but there were very intelligent learned rabbis in the 19th century who said, “No, I don't care what anybody says, the vowels go back to Moses on Mount Sinai.”

And there were others who said, “Well, no, they only go back to the Masoretes, to the 6th or 7th century,” or something like that. There’s a debate that goes back to Eliyahu Bachur, who was the guy who essentially edited what became the Great Rabbinical Bible. So, from your perspective it's not even a possibility they go back to Moses on Mount Sinai. What would be the strongest evidence that they don't go back before, let's say, the year 600? Let's throw out a number there.

Nick: Well, there's no vowel points in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nick: That's a major thing. There are also medieval texts that medieval scholars say they go back to Ezra.

Nehemia: There's some, like in the Kabbalah, that say they go back to Adam.

Nick: That’s a stretch.

Nehemia: That’s like the hyperbole, the exaggeration.

Nick: Yeah, so up to 600, you know as well as I do, there's not a ton of Hebrew manuscripts from the first few centuries after the beginning of the Christian era.

Nehemia: The Israel Museum calls it “the great silent period”.

Nick: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, you've got the Dead Sea Scrolls that end in 135, and then you have the Ashkar-Gilson Scroll, which is kind of an anomaly. Then the next ones you have are, let's call it 800, give or take 100 years.

Nick: Well… I think the best way to approach this, because there's such a lack of evidence for Hebrew, is to look at what was happening in the whole region in the 6th and 7th centuries, and that is the coming of Islam and the spread of Arabic as the dominant linguistic force. So, when this was happening in Arabic in the Koran, in Syriac in the Syriac Bibles, the Christian Bible, and then Hebrew in the Jewish Bible, these were all unvocalized. So, they did not have the vowels, they only had the consonants written.

But as these different languages and language groups and different religions started mixing, it becomes more and more important to record exactly what it was, because if you're no longer speaking Syriac day-to-day… you're a Christian and you start speaking Arabic instead, you may not be able to pronounce the Bible. And then your kids may not learn the Bible exactly as you had learned it, and then the tradition starts to be… some people would say corrupted.

So, it became important for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, to figure out how to vocalize and put vowels into their written texts. They did this all at the same time, so we see it happen in Syriac, where they get this diacritic dot that I talked about, and it evolves into full vowel signs, similar to what we have in Hebrew, although not the same. But they have their own set of dots that represent vowels.

At the same time, around the 7th century and early 8th century, Arabic scribes introduced dots into Arabic, and these dots represented vowels for the first time. Presumably, Hebrew scholars would have been doing the same thing at the same time, so I would say late 7th, probably 8th century would be when I would be sure that someone, somewhere is putting dots into Hebrew texts.

Nehemia: Okay, and from what I understand, the main crux of the debate, let's say, 500 years ago, and even to some extent in the 20th century, was over the Zohar. So, the Zohar explicitly mentions the vowels and the accents, but certainly repeatedly mentions the vowel signs. And when rabbis believed the Zohar had been written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the 2nd century, well, then at least it was there in the 2nd century. Then they realized, “Wait a minute, the Zohar is a pseudepigraphal book. It has nothing to do with Shimon bar Yochai. It was probably written in the 13th century, maybe with earlier sources from the 11th century, and therefore… okay, it was written at a time when you have the full-blown Tiberian system.” So, when the Zohar mentioned Hirik, really, it's because Hirik could have been around in a graphic form for hundreds of years at that point.

Nick: Right.

Nehemia: In the entire Talmud, it never mentions Hirik, it never mentions a Patach, it never mentions a Kamatz. So, we have this vast corpus of tens of thousands of pages - I don't know the exact number of pages - and it never once mentions vowels by name. It mentions pisuki ha’teamim, that's a whole separate discussion about what that is.

And they knew about the vowels. In other words, there's these debates - or not just debates - it's a method of interpretation where they say, “Read the word this way, and not that way.” It's a change of vowels, but there's no evidence from the Talmud that there were graphic symbols to represent those vowels.

Nick: Right, exactly.

Nehemia: So, the Masoretes didn't… to summarize, essentially, what you’re saying, and correct me if this is not your position - the Masoretes didn’t invent the vowel system, they invented a series of graphic symbols to represent the vowels. Is that fair?

Nick: That is probably the easiest way to say it.

Nehemia: Is that the mainstream scholarly view? That’s one of my questions.

Nick: It depends on which stream of scholarship.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nick: In Masoretic studies, yeah, it’s fairly accepted that the Tiberians invented a system of points to record a tradition that was older than them.

Nehemia: Okay, what are some of the other views within scholarship?

Nick: Well, you can say that the Tiberians invented the vowels as their own way of interpreting the text, and it is in fact not derived from an earlier tradition.

Nehemia: Okay.

Nick: I think there are too many connections between things that we can glean from Greek translations of Hebrew in the Second Temple Period and Greek transcriptions of Hebrew, connections between that and the medieval Tiberian tradition that suggests they were not just inventing something on the fly.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, that’s actually really important. What would be some sources of those Greek transcriptions that you’re talking about?

Nick: Well, there is of course the Septuagint…

Nehemia: Let’s assume my audience doesn’t know what the Septuagint is.

Nick: So, it's the early 1st century BC? I don't know exactly when, but they…

Nehemia: The original Septuagint is dated to 250 BC, the time of one of the Ptolemaic kings. He was establishing, according to legend, the library at Alexandria. But that was only the Five Books of Moses. Later, other books were translated. Esther is probably the latest one, because it has a colophon, I forget the date, but sometime around 125 BC, let's call it something like that. So sometime between 250, and 125.

Of course, we don't have that document. We have something from 380 AD in Codex Vaticanus and in Codex Alexandrinus. And then it had been updated over the centuries - that’s another problem that we have - but we have fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls that really are Second Temple Period. So, we have these Greek transcriptions, and in one of the lectures today, they talked about Greek transcription not just from the Septuagint, but from other sources.

Nick: Right.

Nehemia: Which I found fascinating. The Secunda, for example, which is from Origen in the 2nd century CE or AD, and then we have these inscriptions that have transcriptions of words, especially names.

Nick: Right.

Nehemia: So, from some of those sources you can tell the dates, or you have connections, you say rather, to the Tiberian vowel system and tendencies in pronunciations.

Nick: Right. So, you can see the way certain things were pronounced however long ago, when those Greek transcriptions of the Hebrew were made, assuming - and this is the catch - assuming you know how Greek was pronounced then.

Nehemia: That is an interesting question.

Nick: Yeah. Ben Cantor has worked on that quite a bit. He gave a lecture just earlier today. So, you can use those to find some connections between… especially names, because they're transcribed in Greek a certain way. As opposed to translated, they're transcribed from the Hebrew. And also, other ways you could find connections between the Tiberian tradition and earlier traditions is by comparing earlier biblical books and later biblical books.

Nehemia: Talk about that.

Nick: Well, this is not my field of expertise.

Nehemia: Fair enough, but in general.

Nick: But Aaron Hornkohl has done this. He was here today as well… where you can look at the way that the Tiberian’s decided to vocalize, like Niphal versus internal passives, and that can tell you what things were written first or what things were written before and if they're related to the Dead Sea Scrolls based on how the Dead Sea Scrolls were recorded. But it gets very technical, and I don't always follow it, I'll be honest.

Nehemia: Okay, so there's actually distinctions between the way they vocalized things, which means they weren't just making it up on the fly, as you say. Professor Jeffrey Kahn, who is your PhD supervisor, he remarked to me once, he said, “It's ridiculous that the Tiberians just sat down and made-up vowels for words. They were recording these preexisting traditions," and I think he says in his book that they go back to Second Temple times.

Tell us more about your book. Let's end with that, because I want people to go and buy this guy’s book, this is fascinating stuff! I mean, you know what I love about this? This is the type of thing that up until now you had to study Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and then dialects of Aramaic, Syriac. And you’re putting this in a book where somebody at least with some background - I don't know if it's written for the layman - but with some kind of background they can read this and get an idea of, “Okay, here are the connections between these languages and their vowel systems and how they describe the vowel systems.” I think it's very important.

Nick: Yeah, thanks! The first thing is you don't have to buy it; it's open access, and you can download it for free from the Open Book Publishers website. That's the publisher – Open Book Publishers and the University of Cambridge. So you can download it for free. You can also buy it if you want, but I don't get that money, so…

And then the idea of this book, or at least what I've tried to do, was write it in a way that someone who is familiar with one Semitic language like Hebrew, or Syriac, or Arabic, can understand what's going on.

Nehemia: Oh, that's wonderful.

Nick: That’s what I tried to do, and the book is divided into three main sections. The first one is about how did medieval scholars talk about vowels? What did they think a vowel was in comparison to a consonant? They were not written, originally, for them, so they were somehow categorically distinct. So, this first section talks about all the different ways that Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic scholars designated what is a vowel compared to a consonant, and how they were similar between traditions - including the Masoretes.

The second part is about what I call relative vocalization. It's this idea of homographs, words that are written the same way, and then there are ways to distinguish what the vowel should be, but we're not quite recording the vowels yet, so they're always interpreted relative to other words.

Nehemia: Wow.

Nick: And then after that is what I call absolute vocalization. So, when we have all the signs, and we can record each vowel with one sign, and that is also when we start to see the names of the vowels really solidify. So, the third part of the book is really about the names of the vowels in Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew.

Nehemia: Wow, that's fascinating!

Nick: The book is called Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalization in Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew.

Nehemia: Wow! What is the next project you're working on? Can you share that with us? You got your PhD recently, what do you have… I'm excited! What's in the future? If you could share… maybe it's a secret, in which case we’ll edit this out.

Nick: Well, no, it’s not necessarily a secret. I’m working on a couple of things right now. Part of my ongoing research is more about medieval linguistics and trying to understand especially some of the unpublished Masoretic texts that are still in The Cairo Geniza. So, I'm looking at those and also some unpublished Syriac linguistic texts. The other thing that I'm working on right now is looking at printed books in The Cairo Geniza, Hebrew books that were printed in Europe and then came to Cairo.

Nehemia: Wow!

Nick: I’m trying to figure out why they’re there, how they got there, and what that means for the Genizah society.

Nehemia: Wow.

Nick: Those are some of the things that I’m working on right now.

Nehemia: Fascinating. Nick, thanks so much for joining me.

Nick: Thanks.

Nehemia: And I wish you success, and continue your studies, beyond your doctorate. It’s fascinating stuff and I'm looking forward to reading your studies.

Nick: Thank you very much.

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