Could you recommend some reading on this or some better primary sources that are available online? I tried looking through Cairo geniza fragments online, but every time I would come across a word like מספר/מדבר/משפט, there would either be a whole in the manuscript, or the vowel sign on the מ would simply be omitted.
Kahle's
Masoreten des Ostens is the seminal work on the Babylonian tradition, and became the standard reference for the topic. Some of his conclusions are now known to be incorrect, but it nevertheless remains a very useful work. Unfortunately, I'm not aware that it has been translated into any other language. Yeivin's two-volume
The Tradition of Hebrew as Reflected by Babylonian Vocalization (1985), born of a doctoral dissertation, probably constitutes the most comprehensive and authoritative description of the material to date. As a reference for various Hebrew reading traditions, the comparative lexicon of Murtonen's
Hebrew in its West Semitic Setting (1985–1989) is also useful, although it would not qualify as ‘recommended reading’, necessarily.
As for the primary sources themselves, as far as I am aware, there is not a great deal that is easily accessible online. Much of the Cairo Geniza material, as you will have noted, is fragmentary, and often only occasionally vocalised. It is, moreover, important to recall that not all manuscripts vocalised using the Babylonian signs present the Babylonian reading tradition, the
Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus being a case in point. Yeivin classifies the manuscripts according to the degree to which it reflects the reading tradition, and is the work of reference, if you wish to have recourse to (or in lieu of) the primary sources.
How do we know there is only one performative with t-? Perhaps there is more than one and they had different vowels?
This seems to be a not-uncommonly-held position, although I can't cite any references off hand. I remember coming across the theory that the
ta- prefix for verbal nouns was a reflex of the feminine marker /ta/ with its vowel, which, whilst by no means conclusive, was by the same token not implausible. Perhaps there were other common Semitic noun patterns with a prefixed /t-/ that had another vowel, but it does seem like the predominant one was /a/.
I'm not sure what you mean. It seems relatively common to me, even in earlier books. It's hard for me to find examples quickly, as I have not found a website yet that has a morphological search of the Hebrew Bible, but here are a few examples:
When I said rare, I meant rare relative to the usual form of the infinitive. I suppose we have differing notions of
rare, though, and the question, really, can only be settled definitively by counting instances. As for a morphological search, the
miqtal infinitives are simply tagged as nouns in most databases, and many are also (and, indeed, often more commonly) substantival,
e.g., מִשְׁכָּב, which usually means ‘bed’ or ‘lodgings’, so they would have to be individually examined to compile any sort of statistics.
As for the lateness of these infinitives, the three particular examples you cite (from
Ex 12,
Lev 35 and
Num 20) all occur in the putative Priestly material. So as not to open the can of worms that is the Documentary Hypothesis, I shall confine myself to noting that they likely fall among the later elements of the Pentateuch to be composed, without specifying what precisely
late means here.
PS: Some more examples of this phenomenon with geminates:
- גנה appears alternatively as ganna and ginna
- אמתי amittay seems to have been originally amatti
- מגלה megilla seems to have been originally magalla(t)
I generally agree with these statements, but I wonder about their relevance. In particular, אמתי (stem אֱמֶת) seems to have developed from a segholate of the form אמנת—segholates of course have their own particular rules of vocalisation—and ought to be excluded. As for גנה and מגלה, they belong to a larger class of nouns with geminate roots, whose vowel vary between /a/ and /i/ (historically /a/), whereof we have other examples like צַמָּה and אַמָּה alongside כִּפָּה and מִדָּה, all of which exhibit some vacillation in the vowel, with /a/ seemingly tending towards /i/ over the course of time. In all likelihood, this represents some form of attenuation too, but because Aramaic and the non-Tiberian Hebrew reading traditions often have /i/ in such words whilst retaining /a/ in מספר/מדבר/משפט/תקוה, they probably represent an earlier development distinct from the Tiberian attenuation of the latter.
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