holem position in SBL Hebrew vs other fonts

Can someone shed light on why the holem is postioned above the waw in SBL Hebrew vs other fonts?

See pic of example. The first word is SBL Hebrew, the second is Times New Roman.

The holem comes before the waw in the sequence. SBL Hebrew seems to always put the holem above the waw regardless of whether the holem comes before or after the waw.

Just curious as to why.

Bob

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

David Paul

Design flaw.

David Thomas

Ezra SIL seems to replicate the SBL Hebrew problem

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216046#Comment_1216046

I am using third party font (New Jerusalem) and it is also quite odd. Using LHB.

Bob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216058#Comment_1216058

I am using third party font (New Jerusalem) and it is also quite odd. Using LHB.

That's one of the many forms of YHWH. It occurs over 700 times in that form. The two vertical dots that look like a colon is a cantillation mark.

Examples (Gen 4:4, 6:5, 6:6, 11:5, etc.)

The font is displaying it correctly.

Bob

Veli Voipio

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216063#Comment_1216063

Thousand thanks, Bob!

David Paul

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216063#Comment_1216063

The font is displaying it correctly.

Perhaps, but it is still odd. There isn't a vowel marking for the second syllable. As I understand it, sh'waa' doesn't take a closing consonant. That leaves the hei' all by its lonesome. If the hei' were a closing consonant, then the vowel would be ss'ghohl, not sh'waa'.

Bob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216135#Comment_1216135

The font is displaying it correctly.

Perhaps, but it is still odd. There isn't a vowel marking for the second syllable. As I understand it, sh'waa' doesn't take a closing consonant. That leaves the hei' all by its lonesome. If the hei' were a closing consonant, then the vowel would be ss'ghohl, not sh'waa'.

I see what you are saying, but:

in the vast majority of cases (over 5000) the holem is not there in the text after the first hey. There is only a minority of verses where the holem is present. I don’t know why. All I know is that the qamets under the waw tells the reader to say Adonai and if there is a hireq under the waw it tells the reader to say Elohim, because the word prior is already Adonai. Apparently some thought the holem wasn’t necessary in the vast majority of cases. My original question was dealing with the situation where the holem was actually present, but displayed above the waw in SBL and SIL, but other fonts displayed it more correctly above the first hey.

Bob

David Paul

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216135#Comment_1216135

This image without the second-syllable vowel is stirring memories from about a dozen years back. I had just finished two semesters of Hebrew at a local university. I was at my friend Keith's house in Huntsville, and we were sitting in his living room. I was neck-deep in a study trying to figure out whether the Tetragrammaton was a two-syllable or three-syllable word. I said to him that I thought it was probably three and not two, but I couldn't find any definitive proof. I knew that for it to be three-syllables, the second vowel would probably have to be a hhohlem hhasseir (pic below), aka the "defective" or "deficient" hhohlaam.

Still, although pretty sure, I wasn't certain. Not long after, we were at a Sabbath service, and after the sermon was over and people were talking (it was a small congregation of about 20 people), this ten-year-old girl raised her hand and patiently waited for the pastor to call on her. He didn't like her (she had ADHD), so he basically ignored her. She finally said, "I had a dream. Do you want to hear it?" He dismissively said, "Maybe later." She dejectedly walked away. Maybe 10 minutes later, Keith and I were sitting on a bench in front of the meeting space, talking. The girl came up to us and asked, "Do you want to hear my dream?" I was teaching Special Ed at the time, and had worked with many kids like her. I said, "I would love to hear your dream!" She said in her dream she saw a Hebrew letter (she didn't know which one) and there was this ball of dust and ashes that came from the side and kind of bounced across and came to a stop. She asked for a sheet of paper, and she drew what she had seen. It looked like this...

I looked at Keith and practically yelled, "It's the missing vowel!!" She let me keep the picture, but sadly, after many moves I've made, it hasn't turned up recently. Still, the dream got delivered to the right address--it obviously wasn't intended for the pastor. He died recently from COVID; he was about ten years younger than me. In a few months' time after this, he eventually kicked me out for objecting to the way he treated the girl, her brother, and their mom (among others). His treatment of them was often dismissive, contemptuous, and occasionally reprehensible. They were what I call "a spiritual widow and orphans", because although she was married to their father, he never came to services and so they were without a covering protector. According to her, it was because her husband couldn't stand the pastor...go figure. In the pastor's sight, after he had shown me the door, he no doubt felt he had sent a wolf packing; to me, as far as that congregation was concerned, I had died on a hill defending a widow and orphans. In less than a month, I was attending two other congregations. The pastor at one of them (who considered his larger group a sister congregation to the one I had just left) even actively recruited me to attend his Friday evening service. The other was the first real Tohraah study group I had ever attended.

Within a year, with knowledge acquired, experiences gained, and the Hebrew under my belt, YHWH decided to flip the switch on my vision. It was kind of like jacking into the Matrix.

"Gear up, Dave, it's time for battle!"
"I don't know how to fight!"
*jack* blpp blpp blpp blpp blpp blpp
"...I know Kung Fu!"

In less than a week's time, from one Sabbath to the next, I went from "average Dave" to having to deal with a constant Niagara flood of mind-blowing things I had never seen before. In the same year, the pastor went from talking seriously about buying a piece of land and building a "ministry center" to having to give up the small space he had been renting, being forced to resort to having meetings at his home. I think eventually even that dried up.

I guess Yeishuua` was serious when He said, "Suffer the little children."

Bob

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1216150#Comment_1216150

i appreciate the testimony. i still think the vowel pointing is a Qere. The vowels lead us to say Adonai or elohim. Who knows what the real pronunciation of YHWH is.

Bob