Where are all of the Vowels?

Just a note on the Torah that we saw in the last class.

A question was posed about the spaces in the Torah. It is important to remember that the Jewish tradition was an oral tradition before the Torah was written down. As written documents go, the Torah is very early as is the technology.

There are only major separations in the Torah at the beginning of each of the 5 books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc). Otherwise, one has to search for the text where a reading begins. There are some spaces at the end of columns or long paragraphs, but these are not necessarily intuitive break points. There are no chapter numbers and no verse numbers as in the bound forms of the Bible that we are familiar with (ie. Genesis 1:1). There aren't even any punctuation markings! All of that came later.

The vowels were added later by a group of scholars known as the Masorites. The scrolls that were used in the first and second centuries of the common era had no such markings. These were the scrolls that were copied over and over by hand that are the ancestors to our own Torah scrolls.

We do know that the Babylonian sages of the 8-10th centuries had a separate text with vowels. Their text also contained trope markings which tell us how to chant the text. The trope markings also serve as punctuation symbols. If you are interested in how that works, I can show you in a future class.