Abstract

Dorota Molin’s article highlights the importance of the incantation bowls in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic from the sixth–seventh centuries CE for the study of the pre-Masoretic Babylonian reading tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Biblical quotations within these bowls constitute the only direct documentation of Biblical Hebrew from Babylonia at that time. The phonetic spelling of the quotations provides much information about their pronunciation. In a series of case studies Molin shows that the pronunciation of the quotations corresponds closely to the medieval Babylonian reading tradition. She also demonstrates that they reflect interference from the Aramaic vernacular, manifested especially in weakening of the guttural consonants, and that the writers drew from an oral tradition of the Hebrew Bible.

Highlights

  • We survey two sources of inscriptional evidence—Neo-Punic inscriptions from North Africa and Latin and Neo-Punic inscriptions from Sardinia—exploring the implications for better understanding the structure of the Neo-Punic vowel system, that of Latin in© R

  • When attempting to draw solid conclusions from the evidence of the transcriptions, it must always be kept in mind that ancient Israel has been home to many different Hebrew dialects and reading traditions throughout the centuries

  • We have suggested that the introduction of gemination into this form was a product of the reading tradition rather than the living language; it should be compared to the phenomenon of dagesh mavḥin attested in both Tiberian and Babylonian Hebrew

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Summary

Introduction

We survey two sources of inscriptional evidence—Neo-Punic inscriptions from North Africa and Latin and Neo-Punic inscriptions from Sardinia—exploring the implications for better understanding the structure of the Neo-Punic vowel system, that of Latin in© R. The early masoretic treatises discuss many different phonetic contexts in which an isolated, word-internal shewa not under a geminated consonant is pronounced as vocal, in contrast to the general rule These include the shewa under the ‫ מ‬of the word-initial cluster -‫ ַה ְְמ‬(under certain conditions); a shewa under the first of a pair of identical consonants (always when preceded by a long vowel, and often when preceded by a short vowel); the shewa in certain forms of the verbs ‫,בְ ְַרְך/ ִה ְת ָּברְך‬ ‫ ;גְ ְרׁש , ְָּא ְַכל , ָּיְ ְַרד , ְָּה ַלְְך‬the shewa beneath a sibilant following conjunctive waw (under certain conditions); various other smaller classes of phonetic contexts (Yeivin 1968, 22–49).

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