In this episode of Hebrew Voices #209, Read Like a Tiberian Jew: Part 1, Nehemia steps back in time with Rabbi Dr. David Moster to hear a reconstruction of how the Jewish scribes who preserved the Hebrew Bible pronounced Hebrew.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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David: Are you ready?

Nehemia: Yeah, sure.

David: Here it is, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Let’s hear it.

David: We are stepping in a time machine back to the city of Tiberias in the year 930.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! This is Nehemia Gordon and I’m here today with Rabbi Dr. David Moster. He is the founder of the Institute of Biblical Culture, which you can find online, and they have a really strong YouTube presence. And now, I’ve had him before on the program, but now he has a new title. He’s the Director of the Online Biblical Hebrew Program at the JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Shalom, Rabbi Dr. David Moster.

David: Hi, Nehemia, and thank you for having me back again. I’ve seen you a few times since I was last on the program, but it’s good to be here with you, recording. So, thanks for having me back.

Nehemia: David, what is the JTS and what is their Online Biblical Hebrew Program?

David: The Jewish Theological Seminary is the university arm of the Conservative Jewish movement. And that’s Conservative with a capital C, meaning a denomination, not necessarily the conservative movement in America today. Those two are unrelated.

Nehemia: It’s Conservative, that’s the name of the denomination. It’s not that they’re politically conservative.

David: Yeah. One hundred years ago, 120 years ago, the idea was that, on one side was the Orthodox branch of Judaism, which was keeping all the laws of the rabbis. And then, on the other side was a Reformed part of Judaism, which was getting rid of most of the laws of the rabbis and worshiping in a different, new way. And so, the Conservative was somewhere in the middle, and said, “We want to keep the laws of kashrut, of kosher. We want to keep the Hebrew of our synagogues. We want to keep the Torah study, but we can relax in certain areas as well, some of the laws.” And that was a hundred-plus years ago.

But nowadays in America, and it’s not necessarily only in Judaism, but the denominations are becoming much more fluid, and you have people flowing between one and the other.

Nehemia: There’s a term that you’ll hear them say, “Conservadox,” which is someone who goes to a conservative synagogue but they consider themselves orthodox, or vice versa.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Let me make this observation. So, conservative… maybe the most famous conservative with, I don’t know if it’s a small C or a big C, in America, is Ben Shapiro, who’s a conservative political commentator. And that has nothing to do… he’s actually Orthodox, not Conservative.

David: Right.

Nehemia: So, it’s not politically conservative necessarily, it’s the name of the denomination. That’s just worth mentioning.

David: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. So, he’s a conservative, but also a non-Conservative. That’s right.

Nehemia: He’s Orthodox, and he, I think, has very unflattering things to say about Conservative, let’s put it that way, religiously.

David: Well, yeah. The thing is, in the history of Judaism, when people split off from each other and worship differently, then that leads to divisions.

Nehemia: The irony is that when the Reform movement was founded in Germany, the sign that you were Reform and not… because Conservative didn’t exist yet. I don’t know that it was even called Orthodox at the time… whatever it was, non-Reform, was that the rabbi would give his sermon in German and not Yiddish, which is mind-boggling. That would be the equivalent of you giving your sermon in your synagogue with the New York accent versus the standard American accent. It’s almost ridiculous.

David: Yeah. Looking back, it’s not a big deal, right?

Nehemia: Right.

David: But you can imagine in 100 years from now, someone looking back at us and saying, “Wow, they were arguing and bickering.” So, yeah, these are old divisions that have persisted for more than a century.

Nehemia: But the important thing, really, for what we’re talking about is, JTS, Jewish Theological Seminary, is a very respected and renowned institution. It is a combination of a Jewish seminary, meaning if you want to get Rabbinical ordination, you can do it through the JTS, if I’m not mistaken.

David: Correct.

Nehemia: And it’s a university. You can also go there and study just regular university subjects. Is that right?

David: Yeah. Graduate school… almost all of the classes taught at JTS are related in some way to Tanakh, Bible, biblical history, Rabbinic history, Jewish history. And also, it’s located right next to Columbia University and across the street from Union Theological Seminary, which is a non-denominational Christian seminary. And so, a lot of the students can take classes all in this area. And also, New York City as a whole has a lot of great institutions for Jewish studies, like, Yeshiva University is just 50 blocks north. And there’s four of them in other places.

Nehemia: Got you, okay. So, what is the online biblical Hebrew program at JTS? I want to talk about pronunciation of Hebrew, but you have this new exciting title and role, and I don’t want people to miss that. And then we’ll talk about the ancient pronunciation of Hebrew, which is really what we’re coming to do here.

David: Well, we have a certificate program, and the way it’s currently built is that you come in, and we’ll teach you the basics of grammar. And over four classes… by the end of that fourth class, we’re reading chapters of Tanakh, of the Hebrew Bible, together, and you are translating your own. And then we have a new aspect called the Capstone Project, where each student would pick a chapter of the Tanakh, whatever chapter they want, for whatever reason… Some people have a specific Psalm that has always spoken to them. Other people have a coin that relates to some biblical law or something. And so, people will find something that interests them, and then what they’re going to do is translate it on their own and go over it with me.

Nehemia: Wow.

David: So, we really are going from… I don’t want to say zero to sixty, because right now, all the students who walk in our door, they’re already able to read the letters and pronounce the words of the Tanakh, but not necessarily translate them. We are, right now, working on creating an introductory class, which would help people who’ve never learned the Hebrew alphabet learn to read. And that first class would simply be just reading, no translating. We would translate some things, but those would be names or place names. But we would just read so that within that class, people can also join our program.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: It’s been thriving. We have more than 100 students.

Nehemia: Wow.

David: And thank God, each of our classes has been sold out. And so, we’ve had a wait list on every single class.

Nehemia: So, if people listening want to come in and sign up, they’d better do it now, because they’re going to end up waiting either way.

David: Yeah. You can just google Biblical Hebrew Jewish Theological Seminary, JTS. That’s probably the simplest thing to do.

Nehemia: We’ll put a link on NehemiasWall.com.

David: Yeah. We’ll put a link in the podcast description. We’ll try and get a link there, too. But basically, if you search “Biblical Hebrew” and “JTS”, you’ll find our program.

Nehemia: So, let me ask this… and I’m just hypothetically saying, is there a size limit on the chapter? Does it have to be… Like, if somebody comes and says, “I want to do Psalm 119,” you probably tell them…

David: How many verses are in Psalm 119?

Nehemia: It’s the longest one. I don’t know, it’s over 180.

David: I think it’s 176.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, it could be. It’s eight times 22; I’m bad at math.

David: Okay, give me a minute. I’m going to look it up right now while we’re talking, Psalm 119.

Nehemia: What I really want to get to is, if somebody comes to you and says, “The chapter I’m really passionate about, I really want to know, I want to be able to translate myself, is Isaiah 53.” This is the Jewish Theological Seminary; would that be acceptable?

David: Of course!

Nehemia: Okay. Because I’ve been told that Jews don’t read that, it’s a forbidden chapter. Is that true?

David: Nehemia, a forbidden chapter… meaning what? People are ripping it out of the Bibles?

Nehemia: No, they’re not allowed to read it.

David: Wow.

Nehemia: You haven’t heard that? Have you ever heard that?

David: No.

Nehemia: Okay. So, here’s what the listeners have to understand. A lot of Christians will sit down every night before they go to bed, and they’ll read a chapter of the Bible. Jews generally don’t do that. I was close to somebody who was the gabbai of a synagogue, so he’s the equivalent in Christianity of a deacon, and I had a conversation about something in the book about Jephthah, Yiftach in the Book of Judges, and I could see he’d never heard of him. And I said, “Have you ever read the Book of Judges?” And he admitted, he’d never in his life read it, and he had no interest in reading it.

So, the truth is that it’s not… the average Jew, have they read any chapter in Isaiah that isn’t part of, let’s say, the Haftarah? That’s the question.

David: So, the observation you’re making is… One of the great commentators in Judaism, his name was Rashi. Well, his name wasn’t Rashi, it was Shlomo ben Yitzhak. Solomon, the son of Isaac. His acronym is Rashi. He had a grandson, Rashbam, who said that “Nobody’s studying the Bible. Everybody’s studying the Talmud.”

Nehemia: That’s a great quote. Where’s that quote? I love that.

David: It’s just… Yeah, and so that was one of his…

Nehemia: So, now you’ve challenged me. Now I’m opening up Isaiah 53 to see if there are commentaries on it, because if there’s no commentaries, then it’s probably right nobody read it. Okay, so Rashi has a commentary on Isaiah 53. I’m just looking here on M.G. HaKeter, Rabbi Yosef Hara…

David: Ibn Ezra.

Nehemia: Ibn Ezra, Eliezer of Beaugency, Radak, Isaiah of Trani. I’m not sure who Yosef Caspi is; that’s not a well-known commentary, at least for me.

David: No.

Nehemia: So, alright, there’s over just…

David: Let me…

Nehemia: Almost instantly, I can pull up over half a dozen commentaries on it. So, I guess people were reading it.

David: Let me, with one stone, get two birds here. So, your question was, can you pick a topic of what you want?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: And also, the length.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: So, I’ll tell you. The Capstone Project is optional.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

David: I tell people, “It’s only if you want to do this.” We give the students a set time limit. We say, “If after three months you don’t do this, we’re going to send you the certificate anyway.” Why do we do that? Because… Nehemia, you’re a doctor. You have a PhD. You might have seen through the years, or met somebody who’s doing a PhD, say, “Hi, how are you doing? What are you up to?” They say, “I’m getting a PhD,” and they say, “How’s it going?” They say, “I’m in year 17 and I’m about to start my dissertation.” And then, it’s like people get stuck in these academics…

Nehemia: It’s true, it’s true.

David: We don’t want that. I say, “If you don’t finish it…”

Nehemia: It’s definitely true. Go ahead, yeah.

David: Not only… you mentioned Psalm 19 is 176 verses, but there’s another psalm that’s only three verses. If somebody wants that psalm, they can do that psalm.

Nehemia: Well, I’m going to put a challenge out to people to join the JTS Hebrew program, which I honestly don’t know anything about. You just told me about it a few minutes ago. But I know you’re the director, so it’s going to be a good thing. And we should have a flood of people who say, “I want to read Isaiah 53 and I want to translate it myself.” And I just want to be clear; you’re not going to push some Rabbinical agenda on them. You’re going to let them understand what the words actually mean.

David: Here’s a big secret that people who don’t read the Hebrew of the Tanakh might not know.

Nehemia: Uh-oh.

David: It’s an open secret. Whatever translation you’re using, even passages in Isaiah, when translators are just translating the words, it’s not necessarily going to be as broken down on different divisions of religion as you might expect. Like, you can look at Christian commentators on Isaiah and translators and say, “Well, wait, that could have been written by a Jewish group.” You can look at a Jewish group and you might not know what’s different between it and a Christian group.

So, it depends on translation by translation, and for something like that, I would definitely tell the students, “Let’s try and get the Hebrew as much as we can, figure out what it means at the basic level.” And then, “Now, how do you want to translate that? It’s up to you.” How many layers of interpretation?

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And Nehemia, this isn’t new. The ancient translators… just look at the Aramaic Targum. The Aramaic Targum was a translation, and it added great amounts of material to the translation. So, we try to avoid that. But at the end of the day, it’s each person…

Nehemia: Well, the Aramaic Targum is more of a paraphrase. The equivalent would be like the New Living Translation, where you think you’re reading… and it’ll be like, “Hey man.” It’ll use modern… literally instead of “behold” it’ll be, “hey dude”. I don’t know if that’s an actual valid example, but it’s that type of thing. And “behold” anymore is an archaic word. What does it even mean? So, behold means something like “check it out”.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: It means, “look”, is literally what it means.

David: It means “look,” yeah. So, I call this biblical English. So, a word like behold, probably no one’s ever said that to you.

Nehemia: Not in normal speech.

David: Not at the Dollar Market, like, “Behold, here’s a sale!”

Nehemia: No, they’ll say “check it out”.

David: “Check it out,” that’s exactly what I mean. “Behold” is “look”.

Nehemia: Alright. So, I don’t know… this is such a great topic. I want to go to your video where you talk about the pronunciation of biblical Hebrew. We might have to save that for part two. We’re going to continue… But I want to go back here to studying Hebrew. So, you’re saying people have to have a basic, at this point, knowledge of being able to read the Hebrew alphabet.

David: We’re working on a new class, yeah. Hopefully by the time that this airs, we’ll have a new class ready for people, if they’re interested in learning to read the Hebrew letters and pronunciation.

Nehemia: So, this comes to the question of pronunciation. So, you have… your most popular video on YouTube has over 200,000… 242,000 views, and it’s called: What did ancient Hebrew sound like? Is that the pronunciation you’re going to teach them? Or, which pronunciation do you guys use at JTS on the course?

David: So, here’s the thing, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: I want to ask you a question. Did someone ever come to you and said, “How should I pronounce this biblical word?” Or “How should I pronounce this verse?” Have you ever heard that before?

Nehemia: Only on every day that ends in a Y!

David: Okay, every day that ends in a Y.

Nehemia: Seven days a week I get that question!

David: So, I get that all the time too. “How should I pronounce this?” “How should I pronounce that?” And it’s a bothersome question, and I’ve come to the realization of why it’s so tricky. Because when you’re studying the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and somebody says, “How should I pronounce it?” Well, what do you mean, “How should I pronounce it”? Do you mean, “How to pronounce it today in Israel?” That’s one way. Do you mean, “How would Moses have pronounced it?” “How would the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls have pronounced it?” “How would Jesus have pronounced it?” “How would the rabbis of the Talmud pronounce it?”

Or, for example, a lot of people today say, “My parents came from Yemen. This is how they pronounced it in Yemen.” Or “My grandparents came from Iraq. This is how they pronounced it in Iraq,” or Iran, or Morocco, or Italy. So, there’s dozens of Jewish pronunciations historically. So, basically, when somebody asks, “How should you pronounce this word,” it’s a loaded question because they’re basically saying, “Tell me how to pronounce it according to one historical place and time.” That’s basically what they’re asking.

So, here’s the thing. There’s one thing that everyone who reads the Tanakh can agree on; that we are reading the words of the ancient, ancient biblical period, but we’re also reading the vowels and vowel pointings of a small group of scribes, known as the Masoretes, from the 900’s, maybe the 800’s and the 1000’s. So, there’s a small group of scribes that influenced everyone since then. And every single Bible that your listeners have ever used and every Bible on your shelf… I don’t know if that’s a real shelf behind you, Nehemia, or not.

Nehemia: No, that’s a shelf at the Bologna University Library. It’s a photo I took on my iPhone.

David: Okay. So, if there’s a Bible in that library…

Nehemia: I have a shelf in the other room. But in this room, I have a blank white wall. It’s not very interesting, that’s why I have this up here.

David: So, everybody, every Tanakh, Hebrew Bible that you’ve ever seen, Christian Old Testament, it’s all gone through a small group of scribes in a small place, the city of Tiberias, on the Kinneret, the Galilee. And then it went through that group, and it went through one person. It’s like a lightning rod. It all went through one person named Aaron Ben Asher.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: And he wrote the famous Aleppo Codex. So, basically the question is, how do you pronounce Hebrew? There is a scholar named Geoffrey Kahn, and I believe he’s been on your program, correct?

Nehemia: Yes, Professor Geoffrey Kahn from the University of Cambridge. He’s been on the program, yes.

David: And Geoffrey Kahn, I don’t know if he started the school at Cambridge, but Cambridge has a whole group of scholars focused on the Masoretes. And he said, “Well, I’m going to try and figure out how Hebrew sounded in the town of Tiberias in the year 930, give or take a century, in the 900’s.” And he said, “I don’t know how you should pronounce it in Israel today. I don’t know how Moses pronounced it. I don’t know how Deborah sang her song, the Song of Deborah, but I’ll tell you how these little vowel signs and all these millions of markings, what these actually mean.”

And so, what he did is, he wrote a book. Let me show you. I’ll share my screen. Here we have the JTS Biblical Hebrew program, where you can register for a course. But let’s go over here. So, I’ll have this website up for your readers as well. And what we see over here is Geoffrey Kahn’s book. It’s a giant two-volume book, you can download it for free. It’s OpenBook Publishers, which is fascinating. It’s a new world; people are publishing so that people can read, not necessarily to make a buck. And so, over here you can download it. And what I have for you here is… you see, I’ve downloaded it, and you can just go right through it. This is something like 700 pages.

And the coolest thing, though, the most amazing thing about this was, that after telling you for 700 pages what Biblical Hebrew should sound like, he went and he got what I believe was a graduate student named Alex Foreman, and Alex Foreman is, from the brief bio on the website, he’s able to converse in many Semitic languages; Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, the big ones, all the things that you need. And over here what he has is, he’s going to read Genesis 1, Genesis… and Psalm 1, according to the pronunciation of the Masoretes. So, should we play it? You want to do it?

Nehemia: Let’s play it, but before we play it though… We had Geoffrey Kahn on the program, and one of the things that he says is… or let me ask you, because I’m interviewing you rather than saying things. So, is it that Aaron Ben Asher just made up this whole system? Well, what are you saying? In other words, if we want to know what the… So, you said it’s like this lightning rod. It all went through one man.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. I definitely used to think that as well, because then you also have Ben Naphtali as well, who is the rival. And Ben Asher was a school or a family. So, are you saying that the Masoretes just made this whole system up? They said, “Hmm, how should we pronounce the letters Bet, Resh, Alef, Shin, Yud, Tav? Maybe it’s bara’ashit, or maybe it’s buru’ushit,” and they just decided arbitrarily bereshit? What are you saying? What’s your view of how this happened?

David: So, I actually would like to hear what Jeffrey said, because I’m not the expert on this, but this is a common question. To me, it’s very clear that something new is happening here. It’s very clear we have all these new vowels, and so there definitely is something new. But the thing is, Hebrew was pronounced before the vowels were written, so there’s also a continuation going on, just putting in writing what was already there. So, in a certain sense, by definition, it has to be both. There’s a great continuation, but there’s also an aspect of something new. That’s how I see it.

Nehemia: If I remember correctly, what he said was that… and there’s different variations of this among different scholars, so I don’t know that this is him per se… in fact, I’m sure it’s him, because I remember when he told it to me. So, his idea is that they’re recording a pronunciation tradition. Meaning, you have these people who memorize the entire Bible. Maybe they don’t even know what it means, and they’re referred to in the Talmud as these readers.

David: Yes.

Nehemia: And so, you would go, and you’d say, “Okay, what does it say in the first section of Exodus?” And they’d recite it to you, maybe even without understanding what it meant, but they had memorized it. And what the Masoretes did is, they found a way of graphically representing that in writing.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: Meaning, if that guy dies, and he hasn’t taught it to the next guy, well then what happens? Well, we would lose it. So, they wrote down a reading tradition, which I believe Khan says goes back to the Second Temple period, at least.

David: Right.

Nehemia: What it was before that, I’m not sure he says. But in other words, you had people who were in the Second Temple Period who were memorizing it, teaching it father to son, rabbi to disciple, and eventually they’re like, “This isn’t a great system. We should be able to write this down, and there are other systems to write it down, to write down languages that have been developed by the Syriac-speaking Christians, and we should adapt one of those systems, and we should do something similar. Why can’t we do what they did and write it down as well?”

David: Right.

Nehemia: So, in other words, it’s not that Ben Asher just pulled us out of thin air, it’s that he was maybe the end of a long line of people who were finding ways to record it. And one of the mysteries we have is that we have the Tiberian system, the full-blown system. We don’t really see much of a gradual evolution, so we’re missing pieces of the puzzle.

David: We’re missing pieces, yeah. When you say we’re missing pieces, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls from a thousand years before, where we have a ton of text right there. But we don’t have a lot, necessarily, in between for biblical texts. So, you have the Judean Desert, and then…

Nehemia: They call it the Great Silent Period, between the end of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the earliest Masoretic manuscripts.

David: Yeah. So, this is the amazing thing; when somebody says, “What does Hebrew sound like? How should I pronounce it?” What we have is something very different here. This is something that I’ve never heard before. It’s like a recipe, putting all these different bits and pieces together to get something new. So, why don’t we take a look?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: Nehemia, maybe we should read Genesis 1:1, the first verse, just to hear it, and then we’ll read it there. So, could you do it for us?

Nehemia: Let’s have you do it. People have heard me do this a hundred times.

David: Alright, so we’ve heard Nehemia. “Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz.” And for now, let’s just focus on the last vowel sound, “ha’aretz”. So, that means, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” There’s another way to translate this, not for now, the “et ha’aretz”, “and the earth”, and that sound is almost like the “tz” in pizza, aretz, pizza, aretz.

Nehemia: By the way, the way you just read it is not the Israeli pronunciation. What is the pronunciation system? How would you describe it?

David: I would say it’s influenced by modern Israeli, but not necessarily completely Sephardi. Meaning, I still have Ashkenazi, Eastern European pronunciations for the kamatz, b’ara, instead of ba’ra. And so, I still keep some of the pieces of my youth, so to speak.

But when I’m in a synagogue, in my own synagogue… not that I’m the rabbi of the synagogue, but when I’m in synagogue and reading, this is how I would read this differently as an Ashkenazi.

Nehemia: Oh, so read it how you would read it in synagogue.

David: “Bereshis bara Elohim es ha’shamayim v’es ha’aretz.”

Nehemia: Okay, that’s how I was taught to read it as well. And by the way, you also have here the distinguishing between segol and tzere. In Israeli Hebrew, there’s no distinguishing between “eh” and “ay”, even though these symbols represent two different sounds. Meaning, the symbols in the biblical text, the Tiberian system. But the Sephardic system, which was adopted in Israel, just has “eh”.

David: Right. Are you ready?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: Here it is, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Let’s hear it.

David: We are stepping in a time machine back to the city of Tiberias in the year 930.

“Bareshith boro Elohim eth hashomayim v’eth ha’ores.”

Were you able to hear that?

Nehemia: I was. Let’s hear that again.

David: Okay. And I’ll try to show you the…

Nehemia: Yeah, if you can show it to us…

David: I think it was a little bit loud, let me turn down the volume.

“Bareshis boro Elohim eth hashomayim v’eth ha’ores.”

Okay, the first thing… so, what do you notice there, Nehemia?

Nehemia: So, it’s much closer to the traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation than anything you would normally hear in Israel.

David: Right. This isn’t the “ta, ta, ta, ta.” “Ta” is a “tha” here, “bareshi-th”.

Nehemia: Right.

David: So, the Ashkenazic does pretty well here. And then also, like when we said, “ha’aretz”, instead of that “pizza” sound, “tz-tz-tz”, it was “ve’et ha’ares”

Nehemia: So, it’s the Arabic’s fault…

David: “Bareshis boro Elohim eth hashomayim v’eth ha’ores.”

Nehemia: So, it’s not exactly Ashkenazi, but it’s much closer than the modern Israeli pronunciation. It’s very interesting.

David: Yeah. So, it’s now “sa, sa, sa,” like traditional Ashkenazi, but still the Tav, with and without a dagesh, which means this is a “tha” instead of a “ta.” And then we’re also going to have the kamatz versus the patach; the “oh” versus the “ah” is an Ashkenazi feature. And then we’re also going to see the Vav. This Vav has launched like 10 wars online.

Nehemia: Wait, so before you get to that, we’re going to talk about the Vav. We’ll do that in part two, because people love the Vav. That’s a topic my audience is interested in. I’ve done a bunch of programs on the ancient pronunciation of Vav, and I will, on a regular basis, get comments from people saying, “Nehemia, I thought you knew Hebrew. How can you be so stupid and know that it’s not ‘wow’?”

But what is interesting in this pronunciation… and let’s just be clear, what Geoffrey Kahn’s project is attempting to do is, if you went back to the 10th century… and we have references to this. I talked about it in the program with him, that there were people who said, “We should all learn from the Tiberians, because they have the most proper Hebrew. When we make mistakes here in Iraq and in Babylon, it’s because our Hebrew is inferior and the correct one’s in Tiberias.” Which is really interesting, because linguists would generally say that there’s different dialects and different forms of a language, and it’s not that one is superior to the other. So, they had a bit of an inferiority complex in the 10th century. But they said things like, “Go find yourself a Tiberian teacher.” And then they wrote manuals of how to read Tiberian Hebrew, even for people who didn’t read it that way.

And so, what he’s done is, taken those manuals, translated them, and now tried to reconstruct… One of the things, for example, Saadia Gaon famously says is, “The Hebrew alphabet is almost the same as the Arabic in pronunciation, except for this small numbers of letters.” And for example, the letter Tzadi he doesn’t mention as being different. So therefore, your conclusion is: okay, Saadia Gaon pronounced “tzoh” and not “tzuh”, which maybe you can’t hear the difference. Like, literally, my microphone might not be sensitive enough to pick up the difference. “Tzoh” and “tzuh” is very similar, but the Tiberians, apparently… or Saadia Gaon, at least, pronounced it “tzoh.” And that’s what they’re doing here.

David: No, you’re definitely right, Nehemia. So, people come at you, and they ask you these questions, “Didn’t you hear this?” “Didn’t you know that?” And when it comes to Hebrew, that’s why I think Geoffrey Kahn and his… I think we can call it a school by now, there’s a whole group.

Nehemia: The Cambridge School, yeah.

David: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s astounding.

David: Yeah. But honestly, normally, when you say a school, it’s because you want to disagree with them. You know, like, “Oh, the Copenhagen School!” Or “Oh, the Harvard School! We don’t follow those people.” Obviously, I’m saying this out of respect. I think he’s really started a whole movement here. And why would we believe Geoffrey Kahn more than the people on YouTube commenting that you pronounced it wrong? “It’s clearly ‘tzoh’ and ‘tzuh’.” It’s clearly like “pizza”, and a regular S.

Nehemia: Well, it’s not exactly a regular S, it’s the Arabic “Sa” which is…

David: A “S”.

Nehemia: I may not even be doing it correctly. So, alright, I want to get to the Vav, so let’s wrap up this part of the program.

David: Okay, but I’ll say one other thing. So, here’s the evidence. How do you know? There were people interested in this topic a thousand years ago.

Nehemia: Right.

David: And this was before Galileo, and before Isaac Newton. We’re talking centuries before, people cared about this. And there’s this one story about… I forgot what his specific name was, but he was a Nazir, a Nazirite, and this Nazir said, “I went on a trip. And I went to Tiberias, and I sat in the square.” And he was essentially doing field work like a sociologist would today with a recorder, and he was basically saying, “I wanted to hear how these Tiberians, how they pronounce the letter Resh, ‘rah’”. And this is the next letter that people kill each other over, the Resh. Is it a rolling Resh? Do you know how to do a rolling Resh?

Nehemia: I am not capable of pronouncing it, no.

David: Right. So, neither am I!

Nehemia: So, it’s interesting. English has a very unique R, which only exists in two languages that I’m aware of, English and Northeastern Chinese. And as a native English speaker, it’s very difficult to pronounce other forms of the letter R.

David: I know you’ve been to China, so, you spent a great deal of time there. But listen, so this guy, the Nazirite, in the year 1000, goes to Tiberias, sits down and listens. And you know what he says? “They’re pronouncing the Resh three different ways,” and this is the evidence that Khan is looking at, these kinds of treatises that say, “There’s three ways to pronounce Resh. This is how you do the vowel.” We’ll get to the vowel eventually, but here, if we go one more time, let’s just, I think it would be helpful to just…

Nehemia: Yeah. Who you’re citing there, his name is Eli ben Yehuda HaNazir, Eli ben Judah the Nazirite. So, what’s important about what he’s saying is that it wasn’t just that Ben Asher sat down and invented a dialect of Hebrew, this was a dialect that had some living continuation. And you could debate whether it was Aramaic…

David: Right.

Nehemia: But there was some living form of the language, of the pronunciation of the language, in Tiberias in the 10th century.

David: A hundred percent. So, let’s do this one more time, Nehemia. The first verse of the Bible. You ready?

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: So, this is me. I’m going to try and do modern Hebrew, which is the most common way this is pronounced.

Nehemia: Yeah.

David: “Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz.” Actually, on Accordance, we can play it for you. Why don’t I pull up Accordance?

Nehemia: Please do that.

David: Let’s do the reference tools, commentaries. Everybody, Accordance, if you want to study Hebrew Bible, this is the program for you. I do not get a cut. This is unpromoted, unpaid. But you’re going to get to hear it here. Let’s hear Genesis 1:1

“Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz.”

One more time.

“Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz.”

All right, and now we’re going to go back…

Nehemia: And one of the things you’ll hear, if you’re familiar with these things, is there’s no difference between what you had as an “oh” and an “ah”, the kamatz and the patach, even though what we’re about to hear from the person who’s trying to reproduce the Tiberian, he does distinguish those two vowels. Okay, go ahead.

David: Okay, here we go, time machine, we’re going back.

“Bareshis boro Elohim eth hashomayim v’eth ha’ores.”

Nehemia: Alright. So, in the next part we’re going to come right back, and we’ll do another program, and we want to hear about the Vav. So, alright.

David: Alright, one more time. Check out the Biblical Culture YouTube channel. I’d love to see you there and hear your comments. Nehemia, a lot of people in the comments say, “I found you from NehemiasWall,” so it’s fantastic. And if you’re interested in studying biblical Hebrew, let us know quickly at the Jewish Theological Seminary, because like I said, right now all of our classes are full. It would have to be down the road.

Nehemia: Wonderful. Thanks so much, David.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

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BOOKS MENTIONED
The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1
by Geoffrey Khan

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OTHER LINKS
Biblical Hebrew at JTS
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The Institute of Biblical Culture

The post Hebrew Voices #209 – Read Like a Tiberian Jew: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.