July 12, 2019
What Are Those Floating Dots Doing in My Hebrew Bible?
Amid the familiar clutter of vowels and cantillation marks, a few strange dots appear. They have no obvious function, and yet they go back thousands of years. Their purpose is . . .
It’s something I’ve noticed many times in the Bible without ever stopping to wonder about it.
Among the clutter of vowel points and cantillation marks that accompany the Hebrew text in printed editions of the Five Books of Moses are a number of places in which strange dots appear above certain words and letters. They are strange because, unlike the vowel points and cantillation marks, they have no effect on the way anything is pronounced, read, or chanted; remove them, and it wouldn’t make any difference. And, again unlike the vowel points and cantillation marks, which originated in early medieval times, these dots appear in the hand-copied Torah scrolls that are read from in the synagogue, whose text goes back to antiquity.
What are they doing there?