Babylonian Vocalisation: The Eastern Pointing of the Hebrew Bible

Every printed Hebrew Bible uses the Tiberian vowel points: dots and dashes set mostly beneath the letters, worked out by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the early Middle Ages. For several centuries it was not the only system. In the Jewish academies of Babylonia, modern Iraq, scribes wrote their vowels above the line, in small strokes and dots of their own design, and those signs recorded a pronunciation of Hebrew that was not quite the one heard in Tiberias. When Paul Kahle published the surviving fragments in 1913, he described them as material that had been “forgotten for almost a thousand years”.¹ Today the oldest Hebrew book dated by its own colophon is a Babylonian-pointed manuscript, and scholars are still working out how to get its signs into the Unicode Standard.

Pointing from Above

An Eastern Community

Jewish settlement in Babylonia began after the destruction of the First Temple, and the community remained one of the largest and most learned in the Jewish world into the Middle Ages.² Its academies at Sura, Nehardea and Pumbedita produced the Babylonian Talmud and the geonim who led much of the Jewish world in the early Islamic period. By the start of the tenth century, according to Benjamin Kantor, the Babylonian tradition of Hebrew had spread beyond Iraq to the Jewish communities of Iran, the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen.³

The tradition of pronunciation is older than the signs that record it. Kantor points to incantation bowls of the fourth century CE, inscribed in Aramaic and buried under houses to trap demons, whose spellings with vowel letters already reflect Babylonian pronunciation.⁴ The written vowel signs came later. Kantor thinks the Babylonian notation probably began to develop at about the same time as the Palestinian system, “though perhaps just a bit later”, and that the Tiberian signs probably developed slightly after both.⁵ That last point matters for the old argument over the age of the vowel points, told in our post on the Vowel-Point Controversy: the Tiberian system now printed everywhere was one of three medieval solutions to the same problem, and probably not the first.

Where the Signs Were Used

The authors of the 2025 Unicode proposal sum up both supralinear systems as used “primarily by Jewish communities in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) and Palestine between the 6th and 10th centuries CE”.⁶ Babylonian pointing was used mainly for Bible manuscripts, but it also appears on rabbinic texts and piyyuṭim, the liturgical poems of the synagogue.⁷ It was used for Jewish Babylonian Aramaic too, the language of the Babylonian Talmud.⁸ Kahle’s 1913 study covered the Targums as well as the Bible, and its subtitle calls the manuscripts “the oldest pointed manuscripts of the Old Testament and the Targums”.⁹

Most of the surviving witnesses are fragments. The proposal speaks of “hundreds of manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah”, and adds that the Babylonian system is also attested “across hundreds of pages of medieval European manuscripts”.¹⁰ The story of how so much of this material reached modern libraries belongs to the Cairo Geniza and to the collectors described on our Cairo Genizah page.

The Signs

Six Vowels, Two Systems

The Babylonian signs are more complex than either of their rivals. There are two main types, which scholars call the simple system and the compound system. The simple system itself comes in two varieties: a line system made of small strokes above the letters, and a rarer dot system made of supralinear dots. Kantor notes that the dot system does not seem to be older or younger than the line system: both developed at about the same time.¹¹

Each variety has six vowel signs for six vowel sounds:¹²

Sound	Nearest Tiberian sign
i	ḥireq
e	ṣere
a	pataḥ (and seghol)
ɔ	qameṣ
o	ḥolem
u	qibbuṣ or shureq

Several of the line signs started life as tiny letters written over the word. The a sign was originally a miniature ע (ʿayin), the ɔ sign a miniature א (ʾalef), the i sign a small י (yod) and the u sign a tiny ו (waw).¹³ A scribe was, in effect, writing a small vowel letter above a word whose spelling could not be changed. That is the same respect for the consonantal text that lies behind ketiv and qere, where the Masoretes kept a written form they would not alter alongside a reading they would not give up.

The Unicode proposal uses traditional names for the main marks: qamats, pataḥ, tsere, ḥiriq, ḥolam and qubbuts. It takes the shapes from Kahle’s classic chart of 1922, adds a dotted form of pataḥ, and counts seven principal Babylonian points.¹⁴

Shewa, Gemination and the Letters Above the Line

To these was added a short horizontal stroke called the ḥiṭfa, which could mark a vocal shewa.¹⁵ Babylonian scribes also wrote miniature letters above the text for distinctions the bare consonants could not show:

• a small ס (samekh) marked a letter to be read as sin, and a small ש marked shin;
• a small ג (gimel, for gemination) marked doubling, the work done by dagesh in Tiberian;
• a small ק marked rafe, the absence of doubling;
• a small ה marked mappiq, a pronounced final he.

The Unicode proposal gives manuscript examples of each, most from Cambridge Genizah fragments. One is a miniature ה over the last letter of עלותה (ʿalotah, “her coming up”) at Hosea 2:17 in T-S B 2.7.¹⁶

The Compound System

The compound system added marks for vowel length and syllable structure. Placing the ḥiṭfa above or below one of the ordinary vowel signs showed that the vowel was short, or that its syllable was closed. Kantor’s example is the place name Megiddo. A simple-system spelling מְגִדוֹ could stand for either məɣiðo or məɣiddo. The compound spelling, with ḥiṭfa combined with the i sign, can only mean the second, with the d doubled.¹⁷ The Tiberian system makes the same distinction with dagesh. The Babylonian compound system makes it by marking the vowel before the doubled letter.

Accents

Like the Tiberian Masoretes, the Babylonian scribes marked cantillation, the chanted division of the verse. The Unicode proposal documents thirteen supralinear Babylonian accents, following Ronit Shoshany’s study of Babylonian accentuation, with examples drawn from Genizah fragments and from the Berlin manuscript Or. Qu. 680.¹⁸ Their names and shapes differ from the Tiberian ones, but they do the same job of dividing the verse for reading aloud. The Tiberian accents are covered in our post on the Tiberian Masorah and the schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali.

A Different Pronunciation

More Than a Different Script

The Babylonian points are not just another way of writing the Tiberian vowels. The Unicode proposal says so directly: in many instances the Babylonian and Palestinian systems “maintain divergent pronunciations of Hebrew words, reflecting alternate phonological norms”.¹⁹ They are evidence of how Hebrew was actually read aloud in the Middle Ages, in a different region and in a different school.

Kantor regards Babylonian as the reading tradition closest to Tiberian. Both have the distinct qameṣ vowel [ɔ], and both lengthen the prefix vowel of יהיה (yihye, “will be”) in a particular way. He suggests that both go back to a more formal, “biblical” style of recitation rooted in the late Second Temple period.²⁰ Yet the two differ at many points, and some of the differences are obvious even to a beginner.²¹

Six Vowels, Not Seven

Tiberian Hebrew distinguishes seven vowel qualities. Babylonian has six: there is no separate seghol [ɛ], which has merged with pataḥ [a].²² Many words that Tiberian pronounces with an e sound come out with a in the Babylonian tradition:²³

Meaning	Tiberian	Babylonian
“they”	הֵם hem	ham
“heart”	לֵב lev	lav
“grew old”	זָקֵן zaqen	zaqan
“she will give birth”	תֵּלֵד teled	telad
“desert” (Ps 102:7)	מִדְבָּר midbar	madbar

In the last example Babylonian keeps the older a vowel that Tiberian has shifted to i. Kantor sees in these words, together with the loss of seghol, “a general tendency to shift short e → a in Babylonian Hebrew”.²⁴

Gutturals, Furtive Pataḥ and Two Kinds of “From”

The guttural letters behave differently too. Tiberian Hebrew inserts a brief “furtive” pataḥ before a final guttural, so that רוּחַ, “spirit”, is read ruaḥ. Babylonian has no furtive pataḥ: the word is simply ruḥ.²⁵ Where Tiberian writes a reduced ḥaṭef vowel under a guttural, Babylonian usually has a full vowel, as in עֲשִׂיתֶם, “you did”, which in Babylonian is ʿasitam.²⁶ In Job 12:14 Tiberian reads יַהֲרוֹס (yaharos, “he tears down”) where Babylonian reads yihros.²⁷

One difference actually removes an ambiguity. In Tiberian Hebrew, מִמֶּנּוּ (mimmennu) means both “from him” and “from us”. Babylonian keeps them apart: mimmannu for “from him” and mimmenu for “from us”.²⁸

Old, Middle and Late Babylonian

The manuscripts do not all reflect one pronunciation. Following Israel Yeivin, scholars divide them into three stages: Old, Middle and Late Babylonian. The Old Babylonian manuscripts preserve the most archaic and purely Babylonian pronunciation, and they are often only partly vocalised. Middle and Late Babylonian manuscripts are pointed more fully. They also drift towards the Tiberian tradition, since copying the most prestigious reading was common, “especially … in Late Babylonian”. Not every later change came from Tiberias, though: the Babylonian tradition went on developing in its own ways.²⁹ Yeivin classed the Toronto Mishnah, discussed below, as Middle Babylonian.³⁰

The Yemenite Echo

The Babylonian pronunciation did not disappear with the manuscripts. Kantor notes that Yemenite Jews “have preserved features of the medieval Babylonian pronunciation in their own oral reading tradition down to modern times”.³¹ Some of the most important Babylonian-pointed books passed through Yemen. Kahle observed that the Berlin manuscript Or. Qu. 680, the basis of his 1902 study, had clearly been in Yemen because of the way it was later reworked there, though it was just as clearly not written there.³²

Tijan: The Yemenite Bibles

Yemenite Bibles, and above all copies of the Pentateuch, are called tijan (singular taj, Arabic for “crown”). A Sotheby’s catalogue note of 2024 sums up their history. The Yemenite community had long used the Babylonian supralinear system for its Torah codices, then gradually adopted the Tiberian method, probably under the influence of Maimonides, whom Yemenite Jews revered as a legal authority. Because the tijan were copied with great exactness and followed the Masorah closely, modern scholars treat them as valuable witnesses to the Ben Asher tradition. Mordechai Breuer took the agreement between his own edited text and the tijan as confirmation of his method.³³ The older system did not vanish from Yemenite books. A sixteenth-century taj described by the dealers Les Enluminures opens with a liturgical poem by Judah Halevi written with supralinear vowels.³⁴

For Kahle, Yemen mattered most for the Targum. He wrote of “the numerous Yemenite manuscripts with their tradition, so valuable especially for the text of the Targum”, which stand very close to the Tiberian tradition but share some features with the 916 codex and the Berlin manuscript.³⁵ The two oldest Yemenite manuscripts he knew, British Museum Or. 1467 and Or. 2363, use supralinear signs. Their Hebrew text, Kahle concluded, was “only to be understood as a transfer back from a Tiberian-pointed manuscript” and had no independent value, though their Targum text had important peculiarities of its own.³⁶ He was also sceptical of the Bodleian catalogue of 1906, which labelled every supralinear fragment “Yemenite”.³⁷

The living reading tradition of Yemen keeps the clearest trace of the Babylonian vowels. Kantor notes that pronouncing the Tiberian seghol as [a] or [æ] is one of the clear marks of modern Yemenite Hebrew, so that כֶּסֶף, “silver”, in Isaiah 2:7 is heard as kæsæf. He regards the Yemenite traditions as “the present-day continuation of the medieval Babylonian tradition, at least in many respects”.³⁸

Hybrids

Pure examples of either tradition are rarer than one might expect. Kahle warned that old manuscripts often show “complicated mixtures of the traditions of different schools”. The codex of 916 mixes Eastern and Western elements, and so do the Yemenite manuscripts. British Museum Or. 2373 is a mixture of yet another kind: its Masorah belongs to Babylonia, but the rest of the manuscript shows very strong Western influence.³⁹ Even the Berlin manuscript, the best witness Kahle had in 1902, was later “reworked in the Yemenite manner”.⁴⁰ Kahle also traced a wider pressure towards uniformity. From the eleventh century the text named after Ben Asher was more and more accepted as authoritative, and Masoretes worked systematically to bring manuscripts into line with it. He doubted that any manuscript of the thirteenth or fourteenth century escaped its influence altogether.⁴¹ The problem has not gone away. When the Unicode working group reviewed the 2025 encoding proposal, one of its first objections was that “it is common for there to be texts that are hybrid-annotated”, with Babylonian and Tiberian signs side by side.⁴²

The Babylonian Masorah

Easterners and Westerners

The Babylonian scribes had their own Masorah, their own notes on spelling and reading, as well as their own vowels. The medieval lists of differences between the Madinḥa’e (“Easterners”, the Babylonians) and the Ma‘arba’e (“Westerners”, the scholars of the Land of Israel) record many points where the two traditions disagreed. Some involve ketiv and qere, which is why they come up in our post on ketiv and qere. Kahle stressed that there were schools within each camp as well: in Babylonia the traditions of Sura and Nehardea differed, just as Ben Asher differed from Ben Naphtali in the West.⁴³

Ben Naphtali Was Not an Easterner

Kahle also corrected an error that had confused writing on the Masorah for almost four centuries. Elias Levita, the great Masoretic scholar of the sixteenth century, wrote that “the people of the East rely on the reading of Ben Naftali”, while the Western communities followed Ben Asher. Kahle called this an “elementary error” that had misled even Christian D. Ginsburg. For anyone with real insight into the Masorah, he wrote, there could be no doubt that Ben Naphtali, like Ben Asher, “belongs to the West (Tiberias) and has nothing to do with the East (Babylonia)”.⁴⁴ The real Eastern tradition was the one written above the line. The Western schools are described in our post on Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali.

Decline

The Triumph of Tiberias

By the tenth century, Kantor writes, Tiberian “was widely regarded as superior to the other reading traditions, even in areas where the Babylonian tradition was much more commonly used”.⁴⁵ Kahle traced how Tiberian influence “penetrated more and more”, and in the end ensured that the work of the Babylonian Masoretes was forgotten and lost. He also noted that Maimonides already treated the text of Ben Asher as close to authoritative. The model codex associated with that judgement is the subject of our post on the Aleppo Codex, and the Rambam’s role is set out on our Maimonides page.⁴⁶

Kahle blamed the decline of the Babylonian academies. The school at Sura was closed soon after “a last brief flowering” under Saadia Gaon in the first half of the tenth century. Nehardea had come to an end much earlier, though its traditions may have continued at Pumbedita. Saadia, Kahle wrote, was “really the last Jewish scholar who still had a real knowledge of the Babylonian tradition of the biblical text”.⁴⁷

Kahle’s Date Limit and Later Evidence

From this history Kahle drew a bold conclusion: Bible manuscripts pointed by Babylonian Masoretes “cannot in any case be later than 900 CE”, so his fragments belonged to the ninth century at the latest, and some might be older still.⁴⁸ That limit has not held as a general rule. The Unicode proposal notes that the Babylonian system appears on “hundreds of pages of medieval European manuscripts”, and the Yemenite tradition kept Babylonian features alive long after the academies closed.⁴⁹ Kahle was right, though, that the purest Babylonian witnesses are early, and that the famous codex of 916 was not one of them.

Rediscovery

The Codex of 916

The best-known Babylonian-pointed book is a codex of the Latter Prophets dated 916, now in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. Its old catalogue number was B 3, and it is often called the Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus. According to Kahle, Abraham Firkovich found it in 1839 in the synagogue at Chufut-Kale in the Crimea. He gave it to the Odessa Society for History and Antiquities, and in 1863, with the other manuscripts held in Odessa, it was transferred to the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg.⁵⁰ The same library would later acquire the Leningrad Codex, also from Firkovich’s collections.

The codex was described in the catalogue of Hebrew Bible manuscripts by Abraham Harkavy and Hermann L. Strack (1875), and Strack published a photolithographic facsimile in 1876.⁵¹ For decades it was the main evidence for the Babylonian system, and it shaped how scholars imagined that system. Kahle argued that this was misleading. The codex represented “a far later stage of development” than almost all the fragments he had collected, and it showed “a degeneration of the Babylonian tradition that can only be explained by the influence of the Tiberian Masoretes”.⁵² In other words, the most famous Babylonian manuscript was already a hybrid.

Pinsker, Kahle and the Fragments

The first book devoted to the system was Simḥa Pinsker’s Einleitung in das Babylonisch-Hebräische Punktationssystem (Vienna, 1863).⁵³ More fragments came to light in the following decades, from Firkovich’s second collection, bought by the Russian government on Harkavy and Strack’s advice after his death in 1874, and from the Genizah material that reached Oxford, Cambridge and other libraries. Kahle wondered whether Firkovich had acquired the Petersburg fragments in Cairo on his travels to Egypt and Palestine in the 1860s.⁵⁴

Paul Kahle built his early career on this material. His 1902 book Der masoretische Text des Alten Testaments nach der Überlieferung der babylonischen Juden was based on a single manuscript, Berlin Or. Qu. 680. Masoreten des Ostens (1913) confirmed and greatly extended it. In the preface Kahle speaks of more than fifty manuscripts, and in the introduction of “more than 60 different manuscripts of the Eastern tradition”, with facsimiles from seventeen of them.⁵⁵ He found “great diversity” in their pointing: few fragments agreed in every detail. But he valued that diversity, because it gave a glimpse of the effort in the Babylonian academies to fix the received pronunciation ever more precisely. And despite the differences, he wrote, the fragments shared “a common tradition that clearly stands opposed to the Tiberian (Western)”.⁵⁶

Modern Study

The standard modern work is Israel Yeivin’s Hebrew study The Hebrew Language Tradition as Reflected in the Babylonian Vocalization (2 vols, Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1985). It surveys the manuscripts and catalogues the additional signs, and it underlies Geoffrey Khan’s article “Vocalization, Babylonian” in the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2013).⁵⁷ Shoshany’s work on the accents and Kantor’s comparative study of the reading traditions (2023) build on both. Spanish scholarship took an interest early. When the Instituto Arias Montano of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) planned its Madrid Polyglot in the 1950s, the intended apparatus included Babylonian and Tiberian variants from the Cairo Genizah fragments. The project later narrowed to an edition of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, and Kahle corresponded with its director, Federico Pérez Castro, about microfilms of that codex in 1959. The CSIC has since put its photographs and edition online.⁵⁸

The Oldest Dated Hebrew Book

In June 2023 the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit published Judith Olszowy-Schlanger’s study of a single leaf in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1. The leaf belongs to a Mishnah manuscript with Babylonian vowels, known to scholars as “MS A”, whose other surviving parts are in Oxford and Cambridge.⁵⁹ In 1935 Kahle and his collaborators had dated these fragments to the ninth century at the latest, and Kahle regretted that the very last leaf was missing, since it might have carried a date. Olszowy-Schlanger showed that the Toronto leaf is that missing leaf. It completes the Bodleian fragment and ends with the scribe’s colophon, in a mixture of Hebrew and Babylonian Aramaic.

The date is partly damaged, but Olszowy-Schlanger was able to read it with ultraviolet light and a digital microscope. The year, written in Babylonian Aramaic, is 1152 of the Seleucid era, which corresponds to 840 or 841 CE. That makes MS A the earliest dated manuscript of the Mishnah, and “the very earliest medieval Hebrew book explicitly dated by scribal colophon”.⁶⁰ The previous record-holder was also Babylonian: a Bible manuscript from Iran, copied at Gunbat-i-Mallgàn in 903/4 and preserved in nine Genizah fragments. Olszowy-Schlanger notes that the Toronto leaf’s script shows affinities with it.⁶¹

The study also corrects the record on the leaf itself. The online catalogue in Toronto said the manuscript had been dated by radiocarbon to the early eleventh century, but neither the library nor the former owner, Albert Dov Friedberg, had ever commissioned a radiocarbon test.⁶² Olszowy-Schlanger places the leaf within a much larger Babylonian corpus that includes dozens of Genizah fragments and the Sifra manuscript in the Vatican (Vat. ebr. 66). A firm date for one of its members gives a basis for dating the rest.⁶³ Kahle’s instinct that the Babylonian manuscripts were very old has been borne out in an unexpected way: for now, the oldest dated Hebrew book of the Middle Ages carries Babylonian vowels.

Into the Digital Age

Babylonian vocalisation is studied today mostly from photographs, but scholars who want to edit or search Babylonian texts need the signs as characters. Unicode, the international standard for encoding text, includes the Tiberian points and accents but not the supralinear systems. A first proposal in 2004 went nowhere. In May 2025 Aleksandr Andreev and Christa Müller-Kessler submitted a proposal for the Babylonian system (L2/25-268). On 22 October 2025 a larger team submitted a combined proposal for the Babylonian and Palestinian systems (L2/26-038): Andreev, Müller-Kessler, Avi Shmidman, Benjamin Outhwaite and Kim Phillips. It asks for 49 characters.⁶⁴ The proposal argues that without encoding, these systems remain inaccessible to digital scholarship despite their importance for “researching and reconstructing the linguistic history of the Hebrew language”.⁶⁵

The Script Encoding Working Group reviewed the proposal for the Unicode Technical Committee’s 186th meeting in January 2026. Its recommendation was that “no action is requested of the UTC” for the time being. It welcomed the document as “a great step” but listed open questions:

• how the new marks would interact with the Tiberian points already encoded, since many manuscripts mix systems;
• a Judeo-Arabic system of marks that the proposal does not cover;
• characters that look alike across the systems and might be unified, alongside a single proposed Palestinian zaqef that has three very different forms;
• character names that do not follow the pattern of the existing Hebrew characters.

A meeting with experts was planned to take the proposal forward.⁶⁶ At the time of writing, the Babylonian points are still not part of the standard.

Why the Eastern Pointing Matters

Tiberian pointing won, and every Hebrew Bible on a modern desk uses it. Its rival is still worth knowing. The Babylonian vocalisation shows that the Masoretic achievement was not one invention made once, but a set of parallel efforts in Iraq, Iran and Palestine to keep the sound of Scripture alongside its letters. It preserves a pronunciation that differs from Tiberian in ways that matter for the history of Hebrew, and that still echoes in Yemenite synagogues. And it has given scholars both the most famous hybrid codex of the tenth century and the oldest dated Hebrew book of the Middle Ages.

Notes

1. Paul Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens: Die ältesten punktierten Handschriften des Alten Testaments und der Targume (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913), Vorwort: “dies seit fast 1000 Jahren in Vergessenheit geratene Material”. ↩
2. Benjamin Paul Kantor, The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023), pp. 39–40, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0210. ↩
3. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 40. ↩
4. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 40, citing Dotan 2007, Khan 2013, Heijmans 2016 and Molin 2020. ↩
5. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 40, 47. ↩
6. Aleksandr Andreev, Christa Müller-Kessler, Avi Shmidman, Benjamin Outhwaite and Kim Phillips, “Proposal to Encode Characters for the Babylonian and Palestinian Vocalization Systems of Hebrew”, Unicode document L2/26-038 (dated 22 October 2025; registered January 2026), p. 1, https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26038-babylonian-revision.pdf. ↩
7. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 43, citing Khan 2013. ↩
8. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 1. ↩
9. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, title page and Vorwort. ↩
10. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 1. ↩
11. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 40–41. ↩
12. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 41, Table 5. The Tiberian equivalents are given for orientation only. ↩
13. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 41, citing Khan 2013. ↩
14. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, pp. 1–2, citing P. Kahle, “Die Zeichen für die Vokale”, in H. Bauer and P. Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des Alten Testaments, vol. 1 (Halle, 1922), p. 102. ↩
15. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 41. On the name hitfa and its use for vocal shewa, see Andreev et al., L2/26-038, pp. 6–8. ↩
16. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, pp. 4–6, following G. Khan, “Vocalization, Babylonian”, Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 956. ↩
17. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 41–42, citing Yeivin 1985, p. 1092, and Khan 2013, pp. 955–56. Kantor gives the forms in phonetic transcription; they are simplified here. ↩
18. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 8, citing Ronit Shoshany, Biblical Accentuation in the Babylonian Tradition (2022). ↩
19. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 1. ↩
20. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 43, citing Khan 2018. ↩
21. Kantor’s examples are taken from Khan 2013, pp. 956–62 (Linguistic Classification, pp. 43–45). ↩
22. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 40, 43. The Unicode proposal notes that some later Babylonian-pointed manuscripts do mark a seghol: Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 8. ↩
23. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 45. Transliterations are simplified from Kantor’s phonetic notation. ↩
24. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 45. ↩
25. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 44. ↩
26. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 44. ↩
27. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 44. ↩
28. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 45. ↩
29. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 42–43, citing Yeivin 1985, p. 1092, and Khan 2013, p. 954. ↩
30. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “The Oldest Hebrew Manuscript Dated by Its Colophon: A Leaf of a Mishna Manuscript with Babylonian Vocalization in Toronto”, Cambridge University Library, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Fragment of the Month, June 2023, doi:10.17863/CAM.107304. ↩
31. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 40. ↩
32. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVII. ↩
33. Sotheby’s, Important Judaica (2024), catalogue note to “Taj (Yemenite Pentateuch) with Maḥberet ha-Tijan, Yemen, 15th century”. ↩
34. Les Enluminures, “Taj (Yemenite Pentateuch), Yemen, c. 1500–1600”, description TM 1166, vol. 1, p. 1. ↩
35. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, pp. XXI–XXII. ↩
36. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXIV, discussing G. Margoliouth, “The Superlinear Punctuation”, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 15 (1893), p. 166. ↩
37. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXIII, on A. Neubauer and A. E. Cowley, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1906). ↩
38. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, pp. 103, 183, citing S. Morag, The Hebrew Language Tradition of the Yemenite Jews (Jerusalem, 1963), p. 24. ↩
39. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, pp. XX, XXIV. ↩
40. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXI. ↩
41. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XX. ↩
42. Unicode Script Encoding Working Group, L2/26-010, §2.10. ↩
43. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XVI. On the lists of Eastern and Western differences, see Robert Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making: A Study of the Kethib–Qere (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1937), pp. 70–71. ↩
44. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, pp. XII–XIII. ↩
45. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 46, citing Ofer 2016 and Khan 2020. ↩
46. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVIII. ↩
47. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVIII. ↩
48. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVIII. ↩
49. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 1. Kantor, Linguistic Classification, p. 40. ↩
50. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVI, citing S. Pinsker, Einleitung in das Babylonisch-Hebräische Punktationssystem (Vienna, 1863), p. V, and Harkavy and Strack, Catalog, p. XVIII. ↩
51. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVI, n. 1: described as no. B 3 in A. Harkavy and H. L. Strack, Catalog der hebräischen Bibelhandschriften … zu St. Petersburg (1875), pp. 223–35; facsimile by H. L. Strack (St Petersburg and Leipzig, 1876). ↩
52. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVIII. ↩
53. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVI, n. 2. ↩
54. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, pp. XXVI–XXVII. ↩
55. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, Vorwort (“mehr als 50 Handschriften”) and pp. XXVII–XXVIII (“Mehr als 60 verschiedene Handschriften der östlichen Überlieferung”; facsimiles of 17 manuscripts). The two figures are Kahle’s own. ↩
56. Kahle, Masoreten des Ostens, p. XXVII. ↩
57. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 3. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”, n. 1. ↩
58. Elvira Martín-Contreras and Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, The Cairo Codex of the Prophets: Digital Edition (CSIC), “The Edition: Genesis of the Project” and “Elaboration and Publication”. ↩
59. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”, citing P. Kahle, J. Weinberg and T. Weinberg, “The Mishna Text in Babylonia: I”, Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935), pp. 185–222. ↩
60. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”. ↩
61. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”, and n. 21, citing M. Beit-Arié, C. Sirat and M. Glatzer, Codices hebraicis litteris exarati quo tempore scripti fuerint exhibentes, vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), no. 2, pp. 40–41. ↩
62. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”, n. 18. ↩
63. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Oldest Hebrew Manuscript”. ↩
64. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, proposal summary form (49 characters; earlier proposal WG2 N2839, 2004); Unicode Script Encoding Working Group, “Recommendations to UTC #186 (January 2026) on Script Proposals”, L2/26-010, §2.10 (related document L2/25-268). ↩
65. Andreev et al., L2/26-038, p. 1. ↩
66. Unicode Script Encoding Working Group, “Recommendations to UTC #186 (January 2026) on Script Proposals” (19 January 2026), L2/26-010, §2.10, https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26010-sew-recommendations-utc186.pdf. ↩