Geoffrey Khan and the Tiberian Pronunciation

A Tradition That Outlived the Spoken Language

Khan opens the first volume by recalling a standard historical judgement: Hebrew is generally thought to have ceased to be a spoken vernacular around the beginning of the third century C.E., after the remaining Hebrew-speaking settlements of Judaea had been destroyed in the wake of the Bar Kochba revolt. Texts written before that date, including the books of the Hebrew Bible, would therefore have been composed while the language was still spoken. The end of vernacular use, however, was not the end of the language. “Although Hebrew is thought to have ceased to be a vernacular language by the third century C.E.,” he writes, “it remained alive in later periods in oral as well as written form.” The oral recitation of the Hebrew Bible is the central case.^[1]

The sign system that later recorded that recitation was developed in the early Islamic period by the Masoretes of Tiberias. Its purpose, in Khan’s formulation, was to serve as a written notation for a tradition of reading that had already been transmitted orally over many generations, since the Second Temple period. The activities of those Masoretes came to an end in the tenth century, and the living Tiberian pronunciation soon fell out of use among Jewish communities, even as the Tiberian signs themselves became the standard pointing of the Bible.^[2] The book is an attempt to recover the pronunciation those signs were designed to represent, at the period when it was still a living tradition, rather than to describe the later reading traditions that continued to use the same marks.

Why Tiberian Prestige Is Not Antiquity

The Masoretes of Tiberias, in Khan’s account, continued the work of the soferim, the scribes of the Talmudic and Second Temple periods, who had already been occupied with the correct transmission of the biblical text. The most famous of the Masoretic families is that of Aaron ben Asher, whose forebears were engaged in such work over five generations. The tradition they shaped took form over two or three centuries and continued to grow until it was fixed, and their activity ceased, at the beginning of the second millennium. Circles of Masoretes are also known from Iraq in the same period, but it was the Tiberian tradition that became, by the late Middle Ages, virtually the exclusive Masoretic tradition of Judaism and the basis of all printed editions of the Hebrew Bible.^[3]

That later prestige should not be mistaken for a claim that the Tiberian reading never changed. Khan is explicit on the point. Despite indications that the Tiberian pronunciation had undergone linguistic change since it split from a proto-Masoretic reading, medieval sources still regarded it as the most prestigious and authoritative tradition, and they sometimes justified that rank by the claim that its transmitters had never left Palestine. “In reality,” he writes, “the Tiberian reading did undergo change and was, in many cases, less conservative than the Babylonian tradition.” The authoritativeness of the Tiberian reading is more likely, in his view, to have had its roots in the association of the Masoretes with the Palestinian Yeshiva, the central body of Jewish communal authority in Palestine, which was based in Tiberias from late antiquity until the Middle Ages.^[4] Prestige, in other words, is a historical fact about institutions and transmission; it is not, by itself, a phonetic argument.

The Sources Behind the Reconstruction

The early Tiberian Bible codices are, as Khan notes, an important starting point, but they do not by themselves disclose every feature of the pronunciation. The first volume therefore reviews a series of additional sources. These include Masoretic treatises, some of them written in rhymed Hebrew and preserved at the end of medieval Bible codices, and published in part by Seligmann Baer and Hermann Strack in 1879; Masoretic notes in the margins of the manuscripts; Karaite transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic script, produced in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which record the reading rather than the orthography of the written text; and grammatical and lexicographical works by writers who still had access to the Tiberian pronunciation, notably Saadya Gaon and the Karaite grammarians of the tenth and eleventh centuries, as distinct from the later grammarians of Spain, who did not have that direct access.^[5]

The second volume of the work presents a critical edition and translation of sections of the Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ, the medieval “Guide for the Reader” that is itself one of the principal witnesses to the Tiberian tradition. Khan’s study is openly licensed and can be read in full. What this note has tried to record is not the inventory of consonants and vowels, which occupies the later chapters of the first volume, but the frame in which that inventory is offered: a reading that outlived the spoken language, a prestige that should not be confused with changelessness, and a reconstruction that depends on more than the dots and lines of the great codices.

Selected Bibliography