the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

The so-called “Masoretic Bible” is the worlds oldest intact Hebrew scripture. Older versions do exist, but only in very fragmentary forms. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of these older versions. It is important to note that these older forms are substantially different from the Masoretic texts in one very important regard.

The Masoretic spellings of every word contain additional markings that do not exist in the earlier texts. That is to say, the original texts did not include these small additional markings. They were added into the text by the scribes who copied the Masoretic version from an older version.

Why these scribes added the extra markings is not entirely clear, although there are widely accepted theories. What is clear is that it was a momentous decision, due to the fact that the additional markings that they added were never deleted in any of the later versions. Thus the decisions of these scribes forever altered the spelling of almost every word in the Hebrew Bible.

The particular spellings of the Masoretes scribes (as they later came to be called) became embedded into Jewish culture and formed the orthodox canon of Rabbinic Judaism. (However, several groups of Masoretes worked separately, producing several different versions, which is ironic given the widely-believed theory that the intention of the project was to attempt to standardize pronunciation and punctuation.)

The way in which this task was carried out was to add a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of tiny dots, dashes, and other markings, under and over each of the ancient Hebrew letters. The Hebrew letters themselves did not include any such markings. These marking are now referred to as “diacritics”.

Many scholars are fond of pointing out that the ancient Hebrew written language had no vowels. They claim that the diacritics were added in order to clarify which vowel sounds belong within each word.

This is patently false for two reasons:

1. the ancient Hebrew, once diacritics are removed, DOES contain vowels.
2. the diacritics and the vowel sounds do not match up.

The following sections will discuss this further and back up these two claims with evidence.

אויע

https://biblehub.com/hebrew/sham_8033.htm

It has been shown that the diacritics do not effect which vowel belongs in a given word. So what do the diacritics represent?

The mainstream view is not one hundred percent wrong. The diacritics probably do influence the pronunciation; just not in the way they think. The diacritics quite possibly served the purpose of affecting not the vowel sound itself, but rather the pitch of its vocalization as well as volumetric and other types of accentuation. These are critical aspects of the Jewish tradition of memorization and recitation, that are still in use by conservative Jews to this day.

The diacritics can be compared to the musical notation that goes along with the lyrics. This also appears to be one of the main roles of Hebrew affixes.

Diacritics in no way affect the meanings of the words nor the basic pronunciation in spoken language.

This is only worth bringing up because in today's Christian understanding of the Hebrew Bible, many of the word meanings come from erroneous distinctions made long ago, and substantiated via Strong's Concordance and other exegetical tools. These erroneous distinctions are in large part due to, or at least supposedly backed by, the concept that diacritics change the vowels contain within a word, forming a “new” (but actually, invalid) word and thus allowing spurious semantics to be thrust upon the word.