Using Hebrew Letters As Vowels

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In the lessons Why English Needs Vowels and Why Hebrew Is Different, we have seen that Hebrew works much better than English without vowels. If this is the case, how and why did vowels come to be used in Hebrew?

When the books of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) were first written down, they were written entirely without the Hebrew Vowels (dots and dashes) which are present in the Tanakh today. The text contained only the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which we have learned.

Despite what has been said previously about vowels being unnecessary in Hebrew, there are occasions when not having any vowels makes the text harder to read. As time went on, certain letters started to be used as auxiliary vowels. They still had more or less the same sound as before, but were inserted to make it less ambiguous which word was intended when the text was read without dots and dashes.

For a common example of this happening in Scripture, the different spellings of the name David illustrate the point. In books such as Samuel and Kings, David is spelt like this:

  David, pronounced Da-veed

(This is what the word without vowel points looks like.) Without vowel points, this could also be pronounced dod, meaning uncle or beloved, a word used very commonly in the Song of Songs in the form my beloved. Because of this potential ambiguity, other books such as Chronicles and Nehemiah spell David with the addition of the letter Yod to make an ee sound, as follows:

  David, pronounced Da-veed

With this modified spelling, there is no ambiguity. The addition of Yod means that there is no other way to pronounce the word: it has to be David. It cannot be beloved.

Another example is the addition of the letter Heh at the end of words ending in ah. Thus, for instance, Rebecca and Dinah are described in Genesis 24:14,28,55 and 34:3,12 as:

  ‘the damsel’, but spelt without the final Heh.

which is clearly feminine because it refers to Rebecca and Dinah, but without vowels it is the same word used throughout Genesis for a male, and commonly translated as lad or young man in the KJV. Other books, such as Judges, Ruth, Esther and Amos, spell this word with Heh at the end to signify the final ah sound and to make sure there is no ambiguity:

  ‘the maid’ or ‘the damsel’, but now spelt with the final Heh.

Finally, the letter Vav, originally pronounced with a w sound, is often used in Biblical Hebrew as an auxiliary vowel. You will remember from the lessons on the Hebrew alphabet that if there is a dot above the Vav, it is pronounced as o, and if there is a dot inside then it is pronounced oo. Here are these two versions to remind you:

  dot in the middle, pronounced oo
  dot at the top left, pronounced o

Thus, certain Hebrew letters can be used to make the correct pronunciation of the text clearer. These letters are known as emahot hakria – the mothers of reading.

Thus, there are often two ways to spell words in Hebrew – with and without the extra letters acting as vowels. In Hebrew, these alternatives are known as ketiv maleh (full spelling) or ketiv chaser (omitted spelling).

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