Six Degrees of the Shma: Deuteronomy 6:4-6 in Six Historical Pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew

This has been sitting on my queue for a long, LONG time. Thanks to Ben Kantor's recent book on the relationships between the early reading traditions, I was able to lay to rest some of my uncertainties, though not all. I dithered and vacillated about how much of the Shma to do and in what format. Anyway, at this point I think I'd better just post it once and for all, or I'll be tinkering with it forevermore.


What you have here is a theoretical pre-exilic version, a reading based on the dialect of the Secunda, a reading based on Saint Jerome's transcriptions, a reading meant to illustrate what a "Masoretic-type" vocalization might have been like (complete with pausal forms and the long pronoun clitics), followed by readings in reconstructions of Babylonian and Tiberian Hebrew. The reconstructions based on rewinding sound-changes in the relative chronology of Biblical Hebrew, rather than directly attested material, are transcribed in a broad Semiticist notation. The ones based on documented dialects are given in IPA.

For the reconstructions of Jerome's and the Secunda's dialect I'm indebted to Benjamin Kantor, though I have changed a thing or two (notably, I don't think /r/ was dorsal in this period). For the relative chronology of Biblical Hebrew sound changes (which is how two of these readings were arrived at), I'm grateful to Benjamin Suchard and his excellent dissertation.

Most of these recordings are chanted/cantillated one way or another, in part because otherwise it didn't seem like including both the Secunda dialect and Jerome's dialect was justified (his dialect *is* different from that of the Secunda, though the differences aren't super apparent from the passage given here), and in part because I think it's kind of an important point that the phonology of Biblical Hebrew reading traditions was, after a certain point at least, not primarily associated with a normal speaking voice. It's difficult to even make sense of the structure of Tiberian Hebrew unless you envision it chanted. The reading in the theoretical late 2nd Temple para-Masoretic dialect is a very simple chant of my own concoction, and with the reading in Jerome's dialect I was likewise having fun. The Babylonian one is basically bastardized Shaami, and the Tiberian version is bastardized Temani. (I realize it would make way more sense for these two to be reversed, but I liked how my Tiberian one came out so much that I didn't want to part with it.) The greatest uncertainty lies in what Hebrew was like (and indeed whether this passage even looked the same) in the pre-exilic period.


Note: this recording has me pronouncing the actual Tetragrammaton out loud. If you'd rather not hear that, skip the first of these readings. I don't pronounce it in the post-exilic renderings.


Incidentally, if you have not known the pain of trying to get Babylonian vocalization to properly render in a video editor, count yourself lucky. How is it 2024 and we still don't have proper unicode support for Babylonian Hebrew vowels?

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, check out my Patreon here: http://patreon.com/azforeman

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