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 called “diacritics”, which 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 relatively late - sometime around 500 CE, by the scribes who created the Masoretic version by copying the text from an older version and adding their own diacritics. These versions ended up being adopted by a few highly influential Christian translators, but not by the Hebrew community at large. In fact, modern Torah scrolls used in Jewish synagogues today do not include any diacritics.

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 future Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible. The diacritics also made their way into the modern Hebrew language and are now a standard part of the Hebrew grammar.

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.

It is often stated that ancient Hebrew contained no vowels. This is quite incorrect. The following four vowels are found widespread throughout the ancient Hebrew lexicon.

In English, we are accustomed to using five primary vowels; A, E, I, O, U. The four Hebrew vowels do not quite align with ours, but there do exist some parallels as seen in the above table.

The letter ו (named 'waw', or 'vav') represents the consonant “v” in modern Hebrew but in ancient Hebrew may have sounded closer to an English “w”. However, it also represents the vowels sounds “u” and “o”.¹⁾

Even so, these patterns should not be thought of as rules and it is quite easy to find examples which “break the rules”. Take the word “Elohim” for example. Based on the well-known pronunciation, we should expect to find a ו in the word, to make the “o” sound. In a minority of instances this does in fact occur, but in the vast majority of instances, “elohim” is spelled אלהים leaving out the ו, so it technically should be pronounced “elhim”. These kind of spelling and pronunciation problems occur all throughout the texts, affecting the majority of Hebrew words, and often foiling the work of the translator who seeks a consistent application of meaning to a consistent base of words.

Thus it can be seen that the ancient Hebrew language does contain vowels, but perhaps not as many as we would like. Perhaps other grammatical features also add to the pronunciation to assist with the “missing vowels”?

Do diacritics determine the vowel pronunciation of missing vowels? Consider this example:

The first three are typically translated as 'sham', meaning “there”, and the other three are translated as 'shem', meaning “name”. There is a slight problem here; in the more ancient Hebrew documents, before the work of the Masoretes in the first to third century BCE, all six of these instances would have read שם, pronounced 'shem'.

The tiny little diacritic marks that the Masoretes added were supposedly added to aid as a pronunciation guide. Could this claim be true? Well, the first thing to note is that we are given six different diacritic combinations, but only three pronunciations. Clearly, if the diacritics affect pronunciation, the six different combinations should theoretically yield six different pronunciations. But they don't.

There is a bit of a pattern here, but we have to ignore half the diacritics to see it. The 'sham's have tiny little T-shaped diacritic, and the 'shem's have a tiny little pair of dots. we need to ignore all the dots on top and the other little swoopy jots.

There appears to be a correlation between an 'e' vs. 'a' vowel, and a tiny T-shaped object and a pair of dots. We have to ignore the other seven little diacritics to make any sort of correlation at all.

So does it hold true that throughout the Hebrew language a little T-shape makes an “a” sound, and a little pair of dots makes an “e” sound? That question is going to take a lot more analysis. - Let's circle back after more data analysis, as the project continues.

One thing is clear though; out of the nine diacritics examined in this example, seven of the nine had no impact whatsoever on the pronunciation (nor the meaning) leaving only two that might influence pronunciation. This is a far cry from the claim that in general “diacritics determine pronunciation”. That statement, is at best only 2/9ths true. In other words it scores only 22% on the test. In our books, that is a FAIL.

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 “different” word and thus allowing spurious semantics to be thrust upon the word. However, in many cases the case for a different word is very weak. In many cases, the root words are ignored, and new root words are proposed out of thin air in order to justify a meaning that better fits the translators presumptions. To some degree, this is likely to be inevitable. All translators have preconceived notions which influence their work. The same is true in the case of our own translation work. This is why we are going out of our way to present transparency in our translation processes, and hence why we feel it is important to discuss openly even technical details which may seem trivial or boring.

We are aware that we have presented an extemely oversimplified view here.

Here are some external resources for those wishing to dive into this complex subject more deeply.

• https://bnaimitzvahacademy.com/hebrew-vowels-chart/