Biblical Hebrew originally had no written system of vowels. This fragment of Leviticus from the Dead Sea Scroll collection shows that the earliest Biblical manuscripts were in an early “paleo” Hebrew and did not have any vowels. It is important to realize that the orthodox Jews believe that the vowels were inspired by God and passed down to Moses, but they were transmitted only in the Jewish oral tradition accompanying the Bible. In order to codify the oral tradition, the Masoretes developed a system of vowel pointing (nikkudot), placed either above, below or beside the consonants, to indicate the vowel sound to use to pronounce each syllable. This is the origin of the authoritative Masoretic text. However, this system is a relatively recent invention, created between the 7th and the 10th century AD!! It is just one opinion about the “right” vowels. Rabbinical literature, particularly the Book of Legends (Sefer Ha-aggadah), that I have been reading, is filled with fascinating commentary and discussion on various word and vowel choices and how they change or influence the meaning of biblical texts.
There are 23 consonants in the Hebrew alphabet. Unlike our English alphabet, each of these consonants is a pictograph and has a meaning shown in the chart (from the ancient Hebrew research center).
Four of these consonants can serve as vowels: א (alef), ו (waw), ה (he) and י (yod). The presence of these four letters gives a slight indication of some intended vowels. Reading the Bible in this original form is certainly possible but presents unique challenges even for native Hebrew speakers. For comparison let’s consider a few simple English sentences written with only a few vowels:
Th hmn mnd s rmrkbl in ts blty t dcd mnng.
Wth sm ffort w cn rd sntncs tht re mssng 90% f th vwls.
Take a minute and try to reconstruct these sentences.
What I wrote was:
- The human mind is remarkable in its ability to decode meaning.
But a clever person could read this sentence as:
2. The hymn moaned so remarkably in its ability it educed meaning.
To be honest, this second sentence sounds silly, but it actually makes some sense (educed – “means to bring forth or develop or infer something latent from data”). One would have to use context and other clues to decide which one was intended.
The second example was: Wth sm ffort w cn rd sntncs tht re mssng 90% f th vwls.
What I wrote was:
- With some effort we can read sentences that are missing 90% of the vowels.
But once again one could easily instead read:
2. With some effort we can redo sentences that are missing 90% of the vowels.
The second sentence hardly changes the meaning at all, and thus in context it will probably be much harder to choose between these two. Intuitively you can see that there is a challenging ambiguity that missing vowels create.
Fortunately, Hebrew is a little different from English in that the consonants carry most of the meaning. Words are typically formed from 3 consonant roots. Regardless of the vowels chosen (which determine active/passive/reflexive/intensive/causative forms) the basic meaning of words is maintained. But this is not universally true and there are many examples where changing the Hebrew vowel changes the meaning, or where there are multiple meanings for the same set of consonants.
My perspective is that the God who inspired the Bible has left a level of ambiguity in the text that makes it richer, and deeper than it would be otherwise. God’s thoughts are so much higher than ours, that He has seen all the potential meanings and uses them to all. Jewish “mystics” talk about 4 layers of meaning in Biblical texts. Ambiguous vowels is one way that these deeper meanings are embedded in the text.
Atheist to Elder 