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(Only silly because no one else but I would probably be bothered by this.)
1. In Parshas Vayigash (47:11), the land of Rameses is spelled as ?????????. Note the sh’va under the ayin and the sh’va under the mem. Because there are two sh’vas, the second one becomes a sh’va na, and the pronunciation is Ram’ses. In Sh’mos (1:11), it is spelled as ?????????. Note the patach under the ayin. That makes the sh’va under the mem a sh’va nach. The proper pronunciation here is Ra-am-ses.
Why the difference?
2. There are many words in the Hebrew language where the only two vowels are two segols — examples include yeled, kesef and eretz. Whenever any of those words appears at the end of a sentence (or by an esnachta) the first segol changes to a kamatz. Kesef becomes Kasef. Eretz becomes Aretz. Yeled becomes Yaled.
Another such word is Teven (straw). Yet we find numerous examples in Sh’mos 5 where the word is at the end of a sentence and does not change to Taven. Why not?
The Wolf
Wolf-
1. Great question! Ibn Ezra points this out in Vayigash and he explains that these are actually two different locations! Ramesess was the area in which the sons of Ya’akov settled, while Ra’amsess was one of the cities Pharaoh ordered the Jewish people to build.
2. Don’t know. I know the general rule is that the segol becoms a kamatz by an asanachta, and that there are exceptions, but don’t know why.
Wolf –
These are not silly questions.
Every letter and every nekuda in (or NOT in) the Torah is there (or is chasair) for a reason.
I hope some wise reader out there can answer your queries.
These questions and many more can be found on a new website.
“Kol Hamikrah” at http://www.abaalkoreh.com
They are in the section of Pshat Chazal and Halacha.
The website is totally free and downloadable.
M
Ibn Ezra’s pshat in Raamses is one of several. This question was discussed on the leining list serve. I can check the archives if you like.
Re teven/taven: same as above. There are some extremely knowledgable daykanim in the group and some of the posts need to be learned like tshuvos rather than just read. There was some kind of obscure rule cited in RaDaK’s michlol that explained why teven didn’t change.
I put a link in with the tag but it seems to have vanished from my post as it appears in the moderation queue.
lol
I thought the post was about silly dybbuk questions
than I saw it was by wolfish and had to do with ramses and i looked at the title again
I never understood this, because the TORAH Klaf does not have ANY vowelizations.
oomis1105;…But the Chumash does. (Contain Vowelizations/Nekudos.) And that is where wolf looked it up.
No, I know the Chumash has the vowels. But as the original Torah does not, how did we first come to have ANY vowelizations? Was this Anshei Knesses Gedolah who assigned the pronunciation we know today?
It is something called the Mesorah. Originally Mesorah as a proper noun referred specifically to the pronunciation of words in the Torah, the taamim, and the layout of the columns (psuchot and stumot). Mesorah only began to refer to minhagim about things like levush and and accent much later.
The vowels as we see them today were created by the Ben Asher family and the Ba’alei Mesorah around the ninth century. We certainly had a tradition about how to pronounce everything long before that though. Historians disagree about how many rules of grammar the Ba’alei Mesorah created and how many they extrapolated from Chumash itself. We certainly have cases where the word and meaning stay the same but slight grammatical differences can cause slightly different pronunciations for whatever reason. For example, if you look at the Aseres Hadivros, the Tavs in Lo Tirtzach, Lo Tinaf, etc. gain a Dagesh Kal in Ta’am Elyon which they do not have in Tachton simply because the trop changed.
To answer your first question, as a Gabbai I was told that it is okay to assume that it is Ra’amses in 1:11 only because the language wants to add an extra syllable to the word to end the sentence (not like the Ibn Ezra) so that making a mistake between Ra’amses and Ram’ses would not be something I would need to correct a Baal Korei on (according the Ibn Ezra you would have to correct on that).
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