Reading Aloud

בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ

What verse is this?  If you read Hebrew, you will instantly know that this is Bereshit 1:1 without the diacritical (vowel and cantillation) markings.  All that you see above are the consonants.  Can you read it?

Well, of course you can, if you already know how it is vocalized.  Otherwise, you won’t be able to read this at all.  And that’s the point.  You can’t read Hebrew unless you already know what it sounds like, and you can’t know what it sounds like unless someone who  already knows teaches you.  In other words, it is impossible to learn Hebrew from a book.  Hebrew is essentially an oral experience.

“Wait a minute!” you object.  “There are lots and lots of books about reading the Hebrew language.  I have a few myself.  So, of course you can learn Hebrew from a book.”  Well, not actually.  The  reason you can learn Hebrew without an oral teacher is because a thousand years ago some Hebrew speakers added the necessary vocalization marks so that it could be read (decoded) without oral instruction.  After this addition, the verse above looks like this:

 בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

You can immediately see the difference.  Each of those small additions tells you which vowel to use, what to emphasize, etc. so that you can read it without oral help.  But this is not the way Hebrew was taught from generation to generation prior to the Masoretes.  This fact also raises a question about why the Masoretes chose these particular vowels and cantillation marks rather than others.  The Masoretes standardized the text, a text which in its original form required an oral interpreter.  In so doing, they shifted forever the way we understand God’s word.  I don’t mean to say they were wrong.  I mean that they moved believers away from a prophetic culture toward an individualistic culture.

Consider this:

“Since the age of reason, knowledge has come to be conceived of less and less either as wisdom and learning acquired from special persons or as the legacy of a cultural and historical tradition, and more and more as accumulation and mastery of objective data and ‘scientific’ methodologies acquired through diverse means.  Furthermore, most of these means can be divorced from the personal relationship of teacher-student, master-disciple, or sometimes even from author-reader.”[1]

In other words, a text or a book removes us from the personal-relational communication of God’s voice.  It shifts us from listening to an external claim toward an internal mental process.

“Reading for us today is a  silent, apparently wholly mental process.  ‘Our implicit model of written literature’ is ‘the mode of communication to a silent reader through the eye alone, from a definitive written text.’”[2]

This is a seismic change in our knowledge of God’s instructions.

“[In the Egyptian Kingdom] . . . a written text was something conceived as realizable only in the vocal act of reading aloud: . .”[3]

“Oral speech remains the intrinsic form of human communication, and for most literate peoples of history outside our society in recent times, reading has normally been a vocal, physical activity, even for the solitary reader.”[4]

“Consequently, we have constantly to question our assumptions about books, reading, and writing, not only when dealing with non-Western cultures that are often still highly oral, but also when studying our own culture prior to the nineteenth century.  The original and basic orality of reading is the key to the fundamentally oral function of written texts outside of the special context in which we live today.”[5]

“At the most basic level, the oral text was the ‘base text’, if only because reading a manuscript text virtually demanded prior knowledge of the text.  Punctuation and abbreviation were intended to help the lector, not the silent reader.”[6]

The biblical text was intended to be an aid to public recitation of God’s story, not a substitute for communal involvement.  The prophet was a critical element of this communication.  Without his oral delivery, the word of the Lord was indecipherable.  Perhaps we no longer have prophets because we have become readers rather than listeners, and as readers we’ve left something very important on the table.

Topical Index: reading, listening, writing, vocal, oral, Genesis 1:1

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 28.

[2] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 32 citing Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (Methuen, 1982), p. 8.

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

[4] Ibid., p. 33.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 36.