How far back in antiquity can we trace the oral tradition underlying Tiberian Hebrew?

What it is about

The vowel points were written down in the Middle Ages, but which age do they record? Joosten collects cases where the same word or construction is pointed one way in Early Biblical Hebrew (Genesis–Kings) and another way in Late Biblical Hebrew (Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Daniel), with nothing in the consonants to tell the reader. He sets three tests: the case must be a contrast between the two corpora, attested more than once, and the late form must also be typologically late (Aramaic influence, analogy, weakened gutturals), not only found in late books. New cases include נְאָצָה vs Aramaic-patterned נֶאָצָה, the infinitive construct for the absolute in the paronomastic construction (Neh 1:7), iterative weyiqtol in late books where early books alternate weqatal with wayyiqtol (Judg 6:3–4 vs Neh 9:27), and reflexive "fill the hand" in qal (early) vs piel (Chronicles). In 11 of 13 cases on his checklist the early form is the typologically older one, which he takes as evidence that part of the reading tradition goes back to the sixth century BCE or earlier, while other parts were levelled (Jerusalem's -ayim everywhere).

Ideas

• I1. The Torah is entirely EBH, so these contrasts cannot be counted inside our trees; but the Torah's side of each pair can: count the infinitive absolute in the paronomastic construction (אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל type) and the iterative weqatal–wayyiqtol alternation in the Torah as the "early" baseline for chapter 12.
• I2. Adopt the paper's three tests (contrast, repeated attestation, typology aligned with distribution) as the stated criteria in the manual whenever a feature is called early or late.
• I3. The qal/piel pair for reflexive vs transitive action (מִלְאוּ יֶדְכֶם Ex 32:29, qal "gird oneself" vs piel "gird another") is a point for the binyanim section, and a check that MACULA's stem tags in Ex 28–29, Lev 8 agree with it.

For Mova

I1 is a count on the Torah trees (infinitive absolute + finite verb of the same root; weqatal in past iterative contexts) for The verb and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md. I2 is text for 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md (the dating debate). I3 goes into 06-verb.md (binyanim) and the Torah dictionary entry for מלא. The table itself is CC BY-SA: we cite it, we do not copy it.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v11i1.165444

@inproceedings{joosten2026how,
  title = {{How far back in antiquity can we trace the oral tradition underlying Tiberian Hebrew?}},
  author = {Joosten, Jan},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 11},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v11i1.165444},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v11i1.165444}
}

References

34 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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