An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

groups of words joined by conjunctives. 83 Israel Yeivin groups the major
disjunctive accents as follows: “Generally atnaḥ divides the verse, zaqef the verse
halves, pashṭa or revia the unit ending with zaqef, and so on.” 84
c The accent signs in the MT also preserve a tradition. The Talmud mentions
יקספּ םימעט ‘the stops of the ṭə˓amîm‘ which were learned as a normal part of
learning the text. 85 According to S. Morag some punctuation signs were added to
the text before vowel signs, 86 and E. J. Revell suggests that the punctuation was
the first feature after the consonantal text to become stabilized in the Jewish
biblical tradition. 87 Revell has found the oldest evidence for the Hebrew accent
system in the spacing of an early Septuagint text (2d century B.C.E.), which
corresponds almost exactly with the accents in the Hebrew Bible. 88 He postulates
the existence of an early “Syro-Palestinian” accent system that marked the syntax
of a text in a simplified way that mostly agrees with the more complex system of
the MT; pausal forms of the MT represent one manifestation of the simpler
system. 89 Morag’s striking study of the reading traditions of the Yemenite
Jewish[Page 30] community also reopens the question of the validity of the
Masoretic system in intoning the text. 90 The variety of pronunciations among
various Jewish communities signals that caution must be used in absolutizing any
one accentual system, though the extreme neglect of traditional philology is not
83 W. Wickes, Two Treatises on the Accentuation of the Old Testament: On Psalms,
Proverbs, and Job; On the Twenty-one Prose Books, proleg. A. Dotan (New York:
Ktav, 1970), originally 1881, 1887.
84 Yeivin, Tiberian Masorah, 172.
85 Yeivin, Tiberian Masorah, 163–64, reviews the talmudic references. Note the
mention of the use “of the right hand to indicate the ṭ˓my twrh, presumably referring to
the practice known as ‘cheironomy’, still in use in some Jewish communities,” the
most antique practices probably being those of the great synagogue at Rome.
86 Morag cited by Revell, “Punctuation and Chant,” 181.
87 Revell, “Punctuation and Chant,” 181.
88 There are also important data from Qumran: see E. J. Revell, “The Oldest Evidence
for the Hebrew Accent System,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 54 (1971–
72)214–22.
89 Revell, “Punctuation and Chant.” Revell describes manifestations of the Syro-
Palestinian system in (a) Syriac biblical texts, (b) Samaritan Hebrew biblical texts, (c)
Jewish texts of the Mishnah, (d) a few early Greek manuscripts of the Bible, both of
the Septuagint (a second-Century-B.C.E. text usually considered the oldest LXX
manuscript) and of the R or kaige recension (the text published by Barthelemy and
described in 1.5.4), and (e) most importantly for us, the pausal forms of the MT,
which match the final disjunctive accents irregularly enough that they must reflect an
early, independent system with its own significance.
90 S. Morag, “Pronunciations of Hebrew,” Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter,
1971), 13. 1120–45:cf. Barr, Comparative Philology, 217.