Palestinian Vocalisation: The Pointing of the Land of Israel

The printed Hebrew Bible carries a dense system of small signs placed beneath, within and above its letters. These signs, which record the vowels and the musical accents of the text, are the work of the Masoretes of Tiberias, and the system they produced has been the standard form of the Hebrew Bible for about a thousand years.¹ It was not, however, the only system of its kind. Before the Tiberian pointing became universal, Jewish communities in the Near East used at least two other methods of writing vowels. One, used in Iraq, is known as the Babylonian vocalisation. The other, which this article describes, was used in the Land of Israel itself and is known to scholars as the Palestinian vocalisation, or, in a term preferred by some modern writers, the vocalisation of the Land of Israel.²

The Palestinian system placed its signs above the letters, used a small number of dots and short strokes, and reflected a pronunciation of Hebrew that differed in important respects from the one recorded by the Tiberian Masoretes. It fell out of use in the course of the eleventh century, and for centuries it was entirely forgotten. It is known today almost wholly from fragments recovered from the Cairo Genizah, the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, where worn and discarded Hebrew writings accumulated over many centuries.³ The rediscovery of the system in the early twentieth century, and its study since then, have changed the way scholars understand the history of Hebrew pronunciation and the background of the Tiberian Masorah.

Reading Without Vowels

The Hebrew alphabet, like the other alphabets that developed from the West Semitic script, consists of letters for consonants only. Some letters, especially aleph, he, waw and yod, came in time to be used to indicate certain vowels, but this use was partial and inconsistent, and the biblical books were written and copied for many centuries with no complete means of recording how their words were to be pronounced. The reading of Scripture was carried by oral tradition. A reader learned the text from a teacher and recited it in the synagogue according to a tradition of pronunciation, phrasing and chant that was handed down alongside the written scroll.⁴

The Torah scroll used in public worship has remained without vowels and accents to the present day, and the rules for writing it, which the site has described in other articles, forbid the addition of such signs. The systems of vowel pointing therefore developed in codices and in other books used for study and teaching, not in the scrolls read in the synagogue. They were aids for those who had to learn the reading tradition, and records of that tradition for those who wished to preserve it accurately.⁵

The invention of vowel signs for Hebrew is usually placed in the second half of the first millennium of the common era. The Syriac Christians had begun to mark vowels in their own Aramaic script during the sixth and seventh centuries, and the Arabic script acquired vowel signs in the early Islamic period. The Hebrew systems belong to the same broad development, in which communities that read sacred texts in a language no longer spoken in daily life sought to fix the pronunciation of those texts in writing.⁶ The precise date at which each of the Hebrew systems was devised is not known, and no manuscript with vowel signs can be securely dated before the ninth century. Most scholars, however, regard the Palestinian system as earlier than the developed Tiberian system and as one of the first attempts to write Hebrew vowels.⁷⁸

Three Systems of Pointing

The three medieval Hebrew vocalisation systems differ in the shape and position of their signs and in the pronunciation they record. The Tiberian system, which the site has described in its article on the Tiberian Masorah and the schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, places most of its vowel signs below the letters. It distinguishes seven vowel qualities and has a separate sign, the shewa, for the absence of a vowel or for a very short vowel, together with composite signs for the reduced vowels. It is accompanied by an elaborate system of accents that mark the musical cantillation and the syntactic division of each verse.⁹¹⁰

The Babylonian system, which the site has described in its article on Babylonian vocalisation, places its signs above the letters. In its developed form it uses small letters and strokes derived from the letters themselves, and it records the pronunciation of the Jews of Iraq, with six vowel qualities.¹¹ The Palestinian system also places its signs above the letters, but its signs are different from the Babylonian ones, and its sources show a pronunciation with fewer distinctions than either of the others.¹²¹³

The modern names of the three systems can mislead. The Tiberian system was itself developed in Palestine, in the town of Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, which was the principal centre of Masoretic activity in the early Middle Ages.¹⁴ The name Palestinian was given to the other system by the scholars who first recognised it among the Genizah fragments, because its manuscripts pointed to an origin in the Land of Israel outside the Tiberian school. Both systems, then, belong to the Land of Israel, and their relation is one of the central questions in the study of the subject. A medieval witness to the distinction is found in a treatise on vowels and accents transmitted in manuscripts of the Mahzor Vitry, the liturgical compilation of the school of Rashi in northern France, which speaks of the pointing of the Land of Israel as different from the Tiberian pointing.¹⁵

The Signs and Their Placement

The Palestinian vocalisation uses a small set of signs made up of dots and short strokes, written above the consonant after which the vowel is pronounced. In most manuscripts the vowels are distinguished not only by the form of the sign but also by its position relative to the letter, so that a dot placed high above the letter may represent one vowel and a dot placed to the side another. Short horizontal or slanting strokes are used for further vowels, and in some manuscripts combinations of dots and strokes appear.¹⁶¹⁷

The system is not uniform. The surviving manuscripts show several different arrangements of the signs, and individual scribes often used them in their own way. E. J. Revell, who published a comprehensive study of the biblical fragments in 1977, classified the manuscripts into groups according to the forms they employ, and Bruno Chiesa, in a study of the following year, examined the system as a whole in relation to the history of the biblical text.¹⁸¹⁹ Both scholars found that the Palestinian vocalisation was less a single fixed system than a family of related practices, which shared a common principle and a common pronunciation but differed in detail.

The pointing in these manuscripts is often incomplete. Many fragments mark vowels only on some words, usually those that might otherwise be misread, or only on certain letters within a word. This partial pointing is one of the reasons the system has been described as more practical and less comprehensive than the Tiberian, which aimed at a complete notation of every vowel and accent in the text. The Palestinian signs served as reminders for readers who already knew the reading tradition, rather than as a full record for those who did not.²⁰²¹

The Palestinian system also had accent signs, used to mark the division of the verse and its chanting in public reading. Revell’s study is devoted in large part to them. The accents are fewer than in the Tiberian system and are written inconsistently, but they show that the practice of marking the cantillation in writing was not an invention of the Tiberian Masoretes alone.²²

The Pronunciation Behind the Signs

The chief interest of the Palestinian vocalisation for the history of Hebrew lies in the pronunciation it records. The system appears to have represented five vowel qualities, a, e, i, o and u, without the distinctions between the Tiberian qamets and patah, or between tsere and segol. In the Tiberian tradition qamets was pronounced as a back vowel close to the sound of o in English “law”, while patah was an open a; in the Palestinian manuscripts the signs for these vowels are used interchangeably, or a single sign stands for both, which indicates that their readers pronounced them alike. The same is true of tsere and segol, which stand for two e vowels in the Tiberian tradition but appear to have been a single vowel in the Palestinian.²³²⁴

The treatment of the shewa is a further difference. In the Tiberian system the vocal shewa represents a very short vowel, whose quality varied according to its surroundings. In the Palestinian manuscripts the position of the vocal shewa is often filled by a full vowel sign, most frequently the sign for e, or by the sign for the vowel of the following syllable. This suggests that Palestinian readers pronounced these vowels more fully than the Tiberian tradition prescribed.²⁵²⁶

The pronunciation recorded in the Palestinian manuscripts resembles in several respects the pronunciation of Hebrew that later became traditional among Sephardi Jews, in which qamets and patah are both pronounced a and tsere and segol both e. Scholars have long debated how far the Sephardi tradition descends from the Palestinian one. Ilan Eldar, in his study of the Hebrew reading tradition of medieval Ashkenaz, argued that elements of the Palestinian pronunciation were also present in the early Ashkenazi tradition, before it developed its own distinctive features.²⁷ These arguments rest on careful comparison of manuscripts and grammatical writings, and they remain a matter of discussion, but they indicate that the Palestinian vocalisation is evidence not only for a lost system of writing but also for a pronunciation whose influence survived its script.

Geoffrey Khan, in his study of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition, has drawn attention to the fact that the Tiberian Masoretes recorded a particularly careful and conservative reading tradition, while the Palestinian manuscripts reflect a pronunciation that was more widely current among the Jews of the region.²⁸ On this view the two systems are not rival records of a single pronunciation but records of two traditions that coexisted in the same land: a learned tradition associated with the circle of Masoretes in Tiberias, and a more general tradition used in synagogues and schools elsewhere.

The Setting in Byzantine and Early Islamic Palestine

The Palestinian vocalisation belongs to a period in which the Jews of the Land of Israel, though fewer than in earlier centuries, maintained an active religious and literary life. After the suppression of the patriarchate in the early fifth century, the leadership of the community rested with the scholars of the academy and with the synagogues of Galilee and other regions. Archaeological excavations have uncovered many synagogues of the fourth to seventh centuries, with mosaic floors, dedicatory inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic and, in some cases, platforms for the reading of Scripture.²⁹

The Muslim conquest of the 630s brought the region under the rule of the caliphs, first of the Umayyads in Damascus and then of the Abbasids in Baghdad. Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem, and the academy of the Land of Israel was eventually established there. Tiberias, which had been the seat of the patriarchs and of the Palestinian Talmud, remained a centre of learning, and it was there that the Masoretes worked.³⁰³¹ The synagogues of the region continued to use Hebrew in worship and Aramaic in the translation and explanation of Scripture, and it was in this setting, among readers and poets who served these congregations, that the Palestinian pointing appears to have been used. Its signs were thus written in the same land and in the same centuries as the early stages of the Tiberian system, by people who shared the language of worship but not necessarily the methods of the Tiberian school.³²³³

The Manuscripts from the Genizah

Almost all that is known of the Palestinian vocalisation comes from the Cairo Genizah. The Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, the old city of Cairo, kept a storeroom in which writings in Hebrew script were deposited when they were no longer usable, in keeping with the custom of not destroying texts that might contain the name of God. The dry climate of Egypt preserved the contents, and in the late nineteenth century large quantities of fragments left Cairo for libraries in Europe and America. The largest part, gathered by Solomon Schechter in 1896 and 1897, is in Cambridge University Library.³⁴

The Palestinian-pointed fragments are a small proportion of this material. They include parts of biblical books, fragments of the Targum, rabbinic texts and, most numerously, liturgical poetry. The biblical fragments are often written in the form of short sections rather than complete books, and some appear to be texts prepared for liturgical reading, such as the passages from the Prophets read after the Torah on sabbaths and festivals.³⁵³⁶ Manfred Dietrich published a group of newly identified biblical fragments with Palestinian pointing in 1968, and the corpus has continued to grow as the Genizah collections have been catalogued.³⁷

The liturgical poetry is the richest source. The synagogues of Byzantine and early Islamic Palestine developed a tradition of piyyut, elaborate Hebrew poetry composed to accompany the statutory prayers, and its leading poets, among them Yannai in the sixth century and Eleazar birabbi Qallir in the late sixth or early seventh, worked in the Land of Israel.³⁸ Copies of their compositions and of those of later Palestinian poets survive in the Genizah, and a considerable number of them are pointed in the Palestinian manner. Joseph Yahalom catalogued the Palestinian-vocalised piyyut manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah collections in a volume published in 1997, and his work showed how widely the system was used for liturgical texts.³⁹ Palestinian pointing also appears in poetry in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, the spoken language of the Jews of Galilee in late antiquity, some of which was edited by Michael Sokoloff and Joseph Yahalom.⁴⁰

The prevalence of liturgical texts among the Palestinian-pointed manuscripts is significant. It suggests that the system was used above all by the cantors and readers who led the synagogue service, and that its purpose was to guide the recitation of poetry and Scripture in worship. This practical setting may explain its incomplete and variable character. A cantor who knew the poem or the passage needed only occasional signs to recall the correct reading.⁴¹⁴²

The Rediscovery of the System

The existence of Babylonian vowel signs had been known to European scholars since the middle of the nineteenth century, when manuscripts from Yemen and from the collections of Abraham Firkovich in Saint Petersburg revealed a supralinear pointing quite unlike the familiar Tiberian. The Palestinian system was identified later, in the course of the study of the Genizah fragments that reached European libraries at the end of the century.⁴³

The scholar most closely associated with its recognition is Paul Kahle, who devoted much of his career to the history of the Hebrew text and its vocalisation. In the two volumes of his Masoreten des Westens, “Masoretes of the West”, published in 1927 and 1930, he edited fragments with Palestinian pointing and argued that they represented a tradition of the Land of Israel older than the Tiberian.⁴⁴ Kahle also held that the Tiberian Masoretes had not merely recorded an existing pronunciation but had to some extent reformed it, and that the Palestinian manuscripts preserved an earlier stage. This view was widely debated. Later scholars, while accepting much of Kahle’s evidence, have generally regarded the Tiberian tradition as a genuine and ancient reading tradition rather than an artificial reconstruction.⁴⁵⁴⁶

The systematic description of the material came in the second half of the twentieth century. Shelomo Morag’s comparative study of the vocalisation systems of Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, published in 1962, placed the Palestinian system within the wider history of Semitic vowel notation.⁴⁷ Revell’s 1977 study provided an edition and analysis of the biblical texts and their accents; Chiesa’s 1978 volume considered the Palestinian tradition as a witness to the history of the Hebrew Bible; and Yahalom’s 1997 catalogue documented the liturgical manuscripts.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰ In recent years the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge has undertaken further study of the biblical fragments, using the term vocalisation of the Land of Israel for the system.⁵¹⁵²

Palestinian Pointing and the Tiberian Masorah

The relation between the Palestinian and Tiberian systems has been explained in more than one way. On one view, the Palestinian system was the earlier, and the Tiberian Masoretes, working in a centre of learning in the same region, developed a more exact and more complete notation that replaced it. The adoption of the sublinear position for most vowel signs in the Tiberian system may itself reflect the experience of an earlier supralinear practice that crowded the space above the line.⁵³⁵⁴

On another view, the two systems recorded different traditions from the beginning, and the Tiberian prevailed because of the prestige of the Tiberian Masoretes and of the model codices produced in their circle. The site’s article on the Tiberias Masoretes describes the families of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, whose work in the ninth and tenth centuries represents the culmination of the Tiberian school.⁵⁵ The authority of Aaron ben Asher’s codex, which the site has discussed in its article on the Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian standard, was acknowledged by Maimonides in the twelfth century, and by that time the Tiberian pointing had become the norm throughout the Jewish world.⁵⁶

Between the two systems lies a further form of pointing, which uses Tiberian signs but applies them according to a pronunciation closer to the Palestinian. This form, sometimes called the Palestino-Tiberian or extended Tiberian vocalisation, is found in a number of medieval manuscripts, the best known of which is the Codex Reuchlinianus, a manuscript of the Prophets written in 1105 and now in Karlsruhe.⁵⁷⁵⁸ In such manuscripts the Tiberian signs are used, but qamets and patah, or tsere and segol, may be interchanged, and additional signs appear that the standard Tiberian system does not use. The existence of these manuscripts shows that the transition from one system to another was gradual, and that the pronunciation associated with the Palestinian pointing continued in use after its signs had been abandoned.⁵⁹

The Decline of the Palestinian System

The Palestinian vocalisation appears to have gone out of use during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The reasons were partly practical and partly cultural. The Tiberian system offered a complete notation of vowels and accents, linked to a body of Masoretic notes that recorded the exact form of the text, and it was associated with a group of scholars whose authority was recognised by both Rabbanite and Karaite Jews.⁶⁰⁶¹ The Palestinian system, by contrast, was partial and variable, and it lacked an equivalent body of scholarly apparatus.

Political and demographic changes also played a part. The Jewish community of Palestine was weakened during the eleventh century by warfare between the Fatimids and the Seljuks, and the conquest of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1099 brought further destruction. The Palestinian academy, the yeshiva of the Land of Israel, moved from Jerusalem to Tyre and later to Damascus.⁶² In these circumstances the Tiberian codices, copied in Egypt and elsewhere and carried across the Mediterranean, became the models for the Hebrew Bible in every community. The Babylonian system declined in the same period, surviving longest in Yemen, where it continued to be used alongside the Tiberian into the later Middle Ages.⁶³

The Palestinian system left no such refuge. Its manuscripts ceased to be copied, and those already in existence were eventually discarded. Some reached the Genizah in Fustat, where they were preserved by the accident of the custom that forbade their destruction. Had that storeroom not survived, the system would be known only from occasional allusions in medieval writings.⁶⁴

Significance for the History of Hebrew

The Palestinian vocalisation is significant in several respects. It is evidence that the practice of writing Hebrew vowels developed in more than one place and in more than one form, and that the Tiberian system, for all its eventual authority, was one solution among several. It shows how the reading tradition of the Land of Israel was used in the synagogues of the region, especially in the recitation of liturgical poetry, and it supplies a body of manuscripts that are among the earliest pointed Hebrew texts in existence.⁶⁵⁶⁶

It is also a source for the history of Hebrew pronunciation. The five-vowel system it records is close to the pronunciation of Hebrew that prevails today, in the Sephardi tradition and in the Hebrew spoken in modern Israel, which also does not distinguish qamets from patah or tsere from segol in most speakers’ pronunciation.⁶⁷ The comparison should not be pressed too far, since modern Israeli Hebrew has its own complex history, but it shows that the distinctions recorded by the Tiberian Masoretes were not universal even in the Middle Ages. The Samaritan reading tradition of the Torah, preserved by a separate community in Palestine, offers a further point of comparison, since it too reflects a pronunciation that differs from the Tiberian in its vowels.⁶⁸

For textual scholars the Palestinian fragments have a further interest. They show the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible in the same form as the Tiberian manuscripts, with only minor variants, and they therefore confirm the stability of the text in the early Middle Ages. Their differences lie in pronunciation and in the marking of the reading, not in the words of the text.⁶⁹⁷⁰ In this respect they belong to the history of the Masoretic tradition as a whole, as witnesses to the effort to preserve both the letters of Scripture and the manner in which those letters were read.

Further Study

Most of the Palestinian-pointed manuscripts are held in the Genizah collections of Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg and other libraries that acquired Genizah fragments. Many of them have been photographed and made available online through the projects of these libraries.⁷¹ The works of Kahle, Revell, Chiesa, Dietrich and Yahalom remain the principal editions and studies, and the general accounts by Israel Yeivin and Geoffrey Khan place the system within the history of the Tiberian Masorah.^{72737475767778}

The comparison with the Babylonian vocalisation is especially instructive. Both systems placed their signs above the letters, both were displaced by the Tiberian pointing, and both are known chiefly from manuscripts that survived in the Genizah or, in the Babylonian case, in Yemen. Together they show that the Tiberian Bible, which readers of the Hebrew Bible now take for granted, was the result of a long process of development and selection, in which other ways of writing and reading the sacred text were tried and set aside.⁷⁹⁸⁰

Notes

1. Grokipedia, “Tiberian vocalization”. ↩
2. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
3. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
4. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, rev. Alexander Achim Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
5. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
6. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
8. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
9. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
10. Geoffrey Khan, A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and its Reading Tradition, 2nd edn (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). ↩
11. Grokipedia, “Babylonian vocalization”. ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
13. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Tiberias”. ↩
15. Simhah ben Samuel of Vitry, Mahzor Vitry, ed. Simon Hurwitz (Berlin, 1889–1893), the treatise on vowels and accents. ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
17. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
18. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
19. Bruno Chiesa, L’Antico Testamento ebraico secondo la tradizione palestinese (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1978). ↩
20. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
21. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
22. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
23. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
24. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
25. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
26. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
27. Ilan Eldar, The Hebrew Language Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz (ca. 950–1350 C.E.), 2 vols (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1978), in Hebrew. ↩
28. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Tiberias”. ↩
30. Grokipedia, “Tiberias”. ↩
31. Grokipedia, “Masoretes”. ↩
32. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
33. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
34. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
35. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
36. Manfred Dietrich, Neue palästinisch punktierte Bibelfragmente (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
37. Manfred Dietrich, Neue palästinisch punktierte Bibelfragmente (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
38. Grokipedia, “Piyyut”. ↩
39. Joseph Yahalom, Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Cambridge University Library Genizah Series 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
40. Michael Sokoloff and Joseph Yahalom, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999), in Hebrew. ↩
41. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
42. Joseph Yahalom, Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Cambridge University Library Genizah Series 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
43. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
44. Paul Kahle, Masoreten des Westens, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1927–1930). ↩
45. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
46. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, rev. Alexander Achim Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
47. Shelomo Morag, The Vocalization Systems of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). ↩
48. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
49. Bruno Chiesa, L’Antico Testamento ebraico secondo la tradizione palestinese (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1978). ↩
50. Joseph Yahalom, Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Cambridge University Library Genizah Series 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
51. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
53. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
54. Grokipedia, “Tiberian vocalization”. ↩
55. Grokipedia, “Masoretes”. ↩
56. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
57. Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020), open-access edition (DOI 10.11647/OBP.0163). ↩
58. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, rev. Alexander Achim Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
59. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
60. Grokipedia, “Masoretes”. ↩
61. Geoffrey Khan, A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and its Reading Tradition, 2nd edn (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). ↩
62. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
63. Grokipedia, “Babylonian vocalization”. ↩
64. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
65. Grokipedia, “Palestinian vocalization”. ↩
66. Joseph Yahalom, Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Cambridge University Library Genizah Series 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
67. Grokipedia, “Niqqud”. ↩
68. Grokipedia, “Samaritan Hebrew”. ↩
69. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
70. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
71. Grokipedia, “Cairo Geniza”; Cambridge University Library, “Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit”. ↩
72. Paul Kahle, Masoreten des Westens, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1927–1930). ↩
73. E. J. Revell, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents, Masoretic Studies 4 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). ↩
74. Bruno Chiesa, L’Antico Testamento ebraico secondo la tradizione palestinese (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1978). ↩
75. Joseph Yahalom, Palestinian Vocalised Piyyut Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections, Cambridge University Library Genizah Series 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ↩
76. Manfred Dietrich, Neue palästinisch punktierte Bibelfragmente (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
77. Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. E. J. Revell (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1980). ↩
78. Geoffrey Khan, A Short Introduction to the Tiberian Masoretic Bible and its Reading Tradition, 2nd edn (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). ↩
79. Grokipedia, “Tiberian vocalization”. ↩
80. Grokipedia, “Babylonian vocalization”. ↩