The Vowel Points

Nehemiah 8 describes a reading of scripture that lasted from daybreak until noon. Ezra stood on a wooden platform above the crowd, opened the Book of the Law, and read; and the Levites instructed the people as they stood in their places, 'explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read' (Nehemiah 8:8). In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) the heart of the verse is מְפֹרָשׁ (meforash, made clear, distinctly), then וְשׂוֹם שֶׂכֶל (vesom sekhel, and setting the sense), and then וַיָּבִינוּ בַּמִּקְרָא (vayyavinu bammiqra, and they understood the reading). The word מִקְרָא (miqra, reading) is still a Jewish name for the scriptures.

What exactly the Levites did is debated. Meforash comes from a root meaning to make distinct, and in its Aramaic form it describes a Persian letter 'translated and read' before the king (Ezra 4:18). Some scholars therefore think the Levites rendered the Hebrew aloud into Aramaic, which many of the returned exiles now spoke better than Hebrew; others think they read the Hebrew clearly, phrase by phrase, and explained it. The Babylonian Talmud, centuries later, read the verse as the origin of the synagogue's practice. It took meforash to mean the Aramaic translation, setting the sense to mean the division into verses, and they understood the reading to mean the divisions marked by the reading accents, or, some said, the Masoretic traditions. Whether or not that is what Nehemiah meant, it tells you how Jewish teachers came to think of the work of reading scripture well: the right words, the right divisions, and the right sound, so that people understand.

Notice one thing the scroll in Ezra's hands did not have. It had no vowels. Ezra read from a text written in consonants only, like the ones you learned in the last two lessons, perhaps with the letters ה, ו and י used here and there to hint at a vowel. The vowels were in Ezra's head and in the heads of everyone who had been taught to read. The consonants דבר could be דָּבָר (davar, word) or דִּבֶּר (dibber, he spoke), and a reader knew which from the sentence. For more than a thousand years after Ezra, that is how the Hebrew Bible was copied and read: the letters were fixed and the vowels were remembered.

That is what this lesson is about. The vowel signs you will learn were added by scholars who were afraid the remembered vowels might be lost. They did not change a single consonant. They wrote small dots and dashes above, below and inside the letters, so that the way the text had been read could be preserved exactly. When you sound out a Hebrew word with its vowels, you are reading the text as the Jewish community read it aloud, in a tradition whose roots reach back to the synagogues of Jesus' day.

The scholars who added the vowels are called the Masoretes, from the Hebrew word masorah, usually explained as tradition, the tradition handed down. They worked between about AD 600 and 1000, in Babylonia and in the land of Israel. Different centres invented different systems of signs; the one that prevailed, and the one in every Hebrew Bible today, was developed in Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It is called the Tiberian system. Its most famous masters were a family called Ben Asher, over several generations. Their rivals, the Ben Naphtali school, differed from them only in small details.

The Masoretes did three things. They added vowel signs, called pointing, or in Hebrew niqqud. They added accents, the many small marks you see above and below the words in the tools, which show which syllable is stressed, how the verse is divided into phrases, and how it is to be chanted. And they wrote notes in the margins, the Masorah, counting how often unusual words and spellings occur, so that a copyist could check his work and no one could add or drop a letter without the notes giving him away. Where they believed the written consonants should be read differently, they still did not change them; they wrote the reading in the margin. Module 8 explains those notes, called ketiv and qere.

Two great manuscripts come from this tradition. The Aleppo Codex was written in the tenth century, about 930, and pointed, according to a note in it, by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher himself. Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, praised a Ben Asher codex as the most reliable text he knew, and tradition identifies it with this one. Large parts of it, including most of the Torah, were lost after riots in Aleppo in 1947. The Leningrad Codex, copied in Cairo by a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob and dated by its own notes to 1008 or 1009, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that survives. It is kept in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, and it is the basis of the standard scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible and of the Westminster Leningrad Codex that your free tools display.

How far back does the Masoretes' reading go? The Dead Sea Scrolls, a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex, have no vowel signs, but their consonants agree very closely with the Masoretic text in many books, and their spellings and the Greek transcriptions of Hebrew names in the Septuagint and other ancient sources show a reading tradition that was already old. Scholars agree that the Masoretes did not invent the vowels; they preserved a pronunciation that had been handed down. They also agree that the tradition sometimes reflects the Hebrew of later centuries rather than of Moses or David, as all living traditions do. The vowels are evidence of the highest quality, but they are not part of the original writing, and translators occasionally depart from them. When a footnote in your Bible says 'or' and offers a different word, a different vowel reading is sometimes the reason.

A word of honesty about the accents, since the tools show them. They are part of the WLC, and in the interlinear they make the words look crowded. For now, ignore them, except for two marks. The colon-like mark ׃ (sof pasuq) at the end of a verse marks the verse's end. And the mark shaped like a small upside-down V under one word near the middle of most verses, the atnach, marks the verse's main division, like a semicolon. In Nehemiah 8:8 it falls under מְפֹרָשׁ (meforash), so that the verse divides into the clear reading of the Law and then the giving of sense and the people's understanding. In Lesson 5 you will see it divide Genesis 1:1.

Every vowel sign sits under, over or beside a consonant, and is sounded after it. So בָּ is ba, not ab. Most signs go under the letter; holem goes over the top left, and shureq goes in the middle of a vav. Grammars group the signs into long and short vowels, because the difference explains many of the changes words go through, which Modules 3 and 4 will show. Many scholars think the Tiberian signs actually recorded the quality of each vowel, how it sounded, more than its length; for reading aloud, what matters is the sound. This track uses the pronunciation most students learn today, in which several signs sound alike.

The a vowels. Qamets ָ, a small T under the letter, is a as in father: דָּבָר (davar, word). Patach ַ, a short line under the letter, is the same a sound for practical purposes: בַּמֶּה (bammeh, by what?, how?), the first word of Psalm 119:9. The e vowels. Tsere ֵ, two dots side by side, is e as in they: נֵר (ner, lamp). Segol ֶ, three dots in a triangle, is e as in get: מֶלֶךְ (melekh, king). The i vowel. Hireq ִ, one dot under the letter, is i as in machine or as in sit: אִם (im, if), the first word of Proverbs 2:4.

The o vowels. Holem ֹ, a dot over the top left of the letter, is o as in go: לֹא (lo, not), as in Psalm 23:1, 'I shall not want'. The u vowels. Qibbuts ֻ, three dots slanting down to the right, is u as in rule: חֻקֶּיךָ (chuqqekha, your statutes), in Psalm 119:8. That is seven signs with only five sounds, a, e, i, o, u, which is good news. Most of the work in learning the vowels is learning to see the signs, not to say them.

Then there are the vowel letters you met in the last two lessons, now with their signs. A vav with a dot over it, וֹ, is holem written full, still o: טוֹב (tov, good), שָׁלוֹם (shalom, peace). A vav with a dot in its middle, וּ, is shureq, u: יְהוּדָה (yehudah, Judah), הוּא (hu, he). A yod after hireq, ִי, is a long i: כִּי (ki, for, that). A yod after tsere or segol, ֵי or ֶי, is a long e: בֵּין (bein, between), in Genesis 1:4. Beginners sometimes try to sound these vav and yod as consonants; when a vav carries a dot on top or in its middle with no other vowel, or when a yod follows a vowel and has none of its own, it is part of the vowel.

Two traps. First, the sign qamets ָ is also used for a short o, called qamets hatuph, in a closed syllable without the stress. The commonest example in the Bible is כָּל (kol, all), which looks like kal but is said kol: in Psalm 119:168 it is כָל (khol, all) in 'all my ways'. A beginner cannot always tell the two apart; when in doubt, check the transliteration in the tool, which will show o. Second, when a word ends in ח, ע or a sounded ה with a patach under it, the patach is sounded before the letter, not after it. So וְרוּחַ in Genesis 1:2 is veruach, and the Spirit, not veruch-a. Grammars call this a furtive patach, a vowel that sneaks in.

One sign is neither long nor short. Shewa ְ, two dots one above the other under the letter, means either a very short e, like the a in about, or no vowel at all. Learn four rules and you will get it right almost every time. At the start of a word, shewa is sounded: בְּרֵאשִׁית (bereshit, in the beginning), דְבָרֶךָ (devarekha, your word). When two shewas stand under two letters in a row in the middle of a word, the first is silent and the second is sounded: וַיִּקְרְאוּ (vayyiqre'u, and they read), the first word of Nehemiah 8:8, has a silent shewa under the qof and a sounded one under the resh. After a long vowel, shewa is usually sounded: שֹׁמְעִים (shome'im, listening), in 2 Kings 18:26. Otherwise, in the middle of a word after a short vowel, or at the end of a word, it is silent and simply closes the syllable: שָׁמַרְתִּי (shamarti, I have kept), with a silent shewa under the resh.

Four of the letters, א, ה, ח and ע, are throat letters, called gutturals, and they do not like a sounded shewa. Under them the Masoretes wrote a shewa joined to a short vowel, called a hateph vowel, a very short a, e or o. Hateph patach ֲ is a short a: אֲשֶׁר (asher, who, which). Hateph segol ֱ is a short e: אֱלֹהִים (elohim, God). Hateph qamets ֳ, the rarest, is a short o: אָהֳלוֹ (oholo, his tent), as in Genesis 26:25. Say them quickly and lightly.

Last week you learned that a dot inside one of the six begadkephat letters makes it hard. There is a second dot that looks the same, called dagesh forte, the strong dagesh, which means the letter is doubled. It can stand in almost any letter. Here is how to tell the two apart: if the letter with the dot comes straight after a vowel, the dot is a doubling dagesh; if it comes at the start of a word or after a silent shewa, it is the hardening dagesh. So in הַשָּׁמַיִם (hashshamayim, the heavens), from Genesis 1:1, the dot in the shin follows a vowel and doubles it: hash-sha-ma-yim. In פִקּוּדֶיךָ (fiqqudekha, your precepts) the qof is doubled. Many books write the doubled letter only once in transliteration; this track writes it twice, so that you can hear it.

Now put it together. A Hebrew syllable begins with a consonant and contains one vowel. The one exception is the word and when it is written as וּ, which is simply u. To sound out a word, divide it into syllables, each starting with a consonant, then say each syllable and run them together. Take דְּבָרֶךָ, your word, from Psalm 119:105; there the dalet has lost its dot, because the word before it ends in a vowel, but it is sounded the same. Dalet with shewa at the start of the word: de. Bet with qamets, and the bet has no dot because it follows a vowel, so v: va. Resh with segol: re. Final kaph with qamets inside it, soft because it follows a vowel: kha. De-va-re-kha, devarekha, your word. Take אֱלֹהִים. Aleph with hateph segol: e. Lamed with holem: lo. He with hireq and yod: hi. Final mem with no vowel, closing the syllable: m. E-lo-him. Do it slowly, aloud, with every word of your verse this week, and check yourself against the tool. The stress usually falls on the last syllable; the accents show you where it falls elsewhere.

The most important vowels in the Bible are written on a word that is not pronounced as they suggest. God's personal name, the four letters יהוה, occurs nearly seven thousand times in the Old Testament. It is the name God gave to Moses at the burning bush: 'This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation' (Exodus 3:15). Scholars often call it the Tetragrammaton, Greek for the four letters, and transliterate it YHWH.

Long before the Masoretes, Jewish reverence for the name led readers to avoid saying it aloud. The third commandment, 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain' (Exodus 20:7), and the law of Leviticus 24:16 against blaspheming the name, were taken to call for the greatest care. The Mishnah, completed about AD 200, remembers the high priest pronouncing the name in the temple on the Day of Atonement, and treats ordinary pronunciation of it as a grave matter. In reading aloud, Jews said אֲדֹנָי (adonai, my Lord) instead. The Greek translators, at least in the copies Christians used, wrote κύριος (kyrios, Lord), and the New Testament does the same: when Jesus quotes the Shema in Mark 12:29 the Greek has kyrios where Deuteronomy 6:4 has the name.

The Masoretes did not try to record how the name had once been pronounced. They pointed it to show what to say instead. The commonest pointing in the Leningrad Codex is יְהוָה, with a shewa and a qamets, occasionally with a holem as well, as in Genesis 3:14; scholars explain it as a shortened form of the vowels of adonai, or as the vowels of the Aramaic word shema, the Name, which some Jews said instead. Where adonai already stands before the name, so that saying it twice would be awkward, they pointed it יֱהוִה, with the vowels of elohim, God, as in Genesis 15:2. That is why English Bibles, as the King James Version of 1611 did, print LORD in capital letters for the name, Lord for adonai, and GOD in capitals where the Hebrew has adonai followed by the name: 'O Lord GOD' (Genesis 15:2). Whenever you see LORD in the BSB, the interlinear will show you the four letters.

The form Jehovah comes from reading the consonants of the name with the vowels written on it, which were never meant to go with it. It appears in Christian writers of the Middle Ages and spread widely in the sixteenth century, and the King James Version prints it in a few places, as in Exodus 6:3: 'by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them' (KJV). Hebraists agree that it is a hybrid form that no ancient Israelite said. The pronunciation Yahweh is a scholarly reconstruction. It rests on the short form יָהּ (yah), as in הַלְלוּ יָהּ (halelu yah, praise the LORD, hallelujah) in Psalm 150:6, on names that end in -yahu such as חִלְקִיָּהוּ (chilqiyyahu, Hilkiah) in 2 Kings 18:26, and on Greek spellings of the name in some early Christian writers. Most scholars accept it as very probable; it is not certain.

Christians differ on what to do with that knowledge, and both sides have good reasons. Some, and some translations such as the Jerusalem Bible and the Legacy Standard Bible, write or say Yahweh. They argue that God revealed his name to be known and called upon (Exodus 3:15), that LORD turns a personal name into a title and hides how personal the covenant is, and that the third commandment forbids misusing the name, not using it. Others, with the BSB and most English Bibles, keep LORD. They argue that the apostles, when they quoted the Old Testament, followed the practice of rendering the name as Lord, so that the New Testament itself models it; that this is how the New Testament can call Jesus kyrios with the full weight of the Old Testament name behind it; and that it honours the conscience of Jewish neighbours and the church's long practice. You do not need to settle this to read Hebrew. You need to know what LORD stands for, and to explain it to your church in a way that leaves them more reverent toward the name, not less.

Turn to the third and fourth pages of your Hebrew notebook, which you left blank in Lesson 1, and head them The vowels. Write each vowel sign under a consonant, using bet for all of them so that you see the sign and not the letter: בָּ בַּ בֵּ בֶּ בִּ בֹּ בֻּ, then בּוֹ בּוּ בִּי בֵּי, then בְּ and the three hateph vowels under aleph: אֲ אֱ אֳ. Beside each write its name, its sound, and one real word from this lesson. Add the four rules for shewa, the rule for telling the two kinds of dagesh apart, and the two traps, qamets hatuph and furtive patach. Make a flashcard for each vowel sign.

Then go back to the first verse of your passage. Copy it onto a fresh page with all its vowels, large, leaving a line under it. Divide each word into syllables with small vertical strokes, each syllable beginning with a consonant. Write the sound of each syllable underneath. Then read the whole verse aloud, slowly, word by word, and check every word against the transliteration in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible. Where your reading and the tool's differ, find out why; usually it will be a shewa or a qamets hatuph. Some lexicon pages in Blue Letter Bible also let you hear a recorded pronunciation of the word, which is worth using.

Now record yourself. Use the voice recorder on your phone, or a voice message to yourself in a messaging app, and read the verse aloud in Hebrew as well as you can, then read it in your own language. Listen back. Do it again on three days this week, and keep the first and the last recordings. You will hear yourself becoming fluent. This is the step that turns the letters on the page into the sound the Levites made in Nehemiah 8, and it is worth more than any amount of looking.

Last, look through your whole passage in the interlinear and find every place where the BSB or your church's Bible says LORD, Lord, GOD or God. For each one, write down which Hebrew word stands behind it: the four letters of the name, adonai, or elohim. Then write two or three sentences, in plain words, that you could say to your congregation the next time you read one of those verses aloud, explaining why the Bible says LORD in capitals. Keep the sentences short. The aim of Nehemiah 8:8 is still the aim: that the people understand what is being read.