BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

On the interpretation of Scripture
¢ve classes, according to the ¢ve organs of the mouth involved in pronunciation,
i.e. the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the palate and the throat. For
example, alef, h _
et,‘ayin and he are called gutturals, and one is used for
another without any distinction, at least so far as we know. Similarly, el,
which means ‘to’, is often used for ‘al, which means ‘above’, and vice versa.
This often renders all the parts of a phrase ambiguous or turns them into
sounds devoid of meaning.
A second major source of ambiguity of phrases arises from the fact that
conjunctions and adverbs have multiple signi¢cations. For instance, vav
serves indi¡erently as a conjunction and disjunction: it can mean ‘and’,
‘but’, ‘because’, ‘moreover’ and ‘then’. ki has seven or eight meanings:
‘because’, ‘although’, ‘if ’, ‘when’, ‘just as’, ‘that’, ‘burning’, etc. It is the
same with nearly all the particles.
The third ambiguity, that generates many others, is that verbs in the
indicative have no present, imperfect, pluperfect, future perfect or other
tenses which are usual in other languages; in the imperative and the in¢nitive
they lack all but the present tense, and in the subjunctive they have
no tenses at all. All these de¢ciencies of tense and mood can indeed be
compensated for, very readily and neatly, from basic features of the language,
following certain rules. But the earliest writers completely ignored
them, and indi¡erently used the future tense for the present and past, and
the past for the future, as well as the indicative for the imperative and
subjunctive, and this has caused a good deal of uncertainty.
[13] Besides these three causes of obscurity in Hebrew, two others
should be noted both of which are far more important.The ¢rst of these
is that Hebrew has no letters for vowels.The second is that the Hebrews 108
did not use punctuation marks to separate clauses or for any kind of
expression or emphasis.While both these things (both vowels and signs)
are normally indicated by points and accents, we cannot accept these
uncritically because they were invented and inserted by critics of a later
period, whose authority ought not to weigh with us. It is clear from
an abundance of evidence that the ancient writers wrote without points
(i.e., without vowels and accents). Later generations added these two
features in accordance with their own interpretations of the biblical
books. Hence, accents and points which we now have are merely recent
interpretations, and deserve no more credit or authority than other
explanations of these authors.
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