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Vowels That Are Not There

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Vowels That Are Not There

Hebrew is written with consonants. The vowel points that fix pronunciation were developed by the Masoretes between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries and are absent from the consonantal text the seventy-two are cut from.

The consequence for this system is direct. Each name is three consonants plus a suffix. Nothing in the derivation supplies vowels, so every pronunciation of every one of the seventy-two is an interpolation, reasonable, conventional, and not given by the procedure.

That is why the Latin-letter forms vary so widely across sources. The same three letters appear as Lauviah, Laviah, Loviah, Lauiah, Levuiah. Others appear with or without an initial aspirate, with i or y or j, with v or u or w, with a hyphen or without. French sources, English sources and German sources each apply their own orthographic habits, and English lists are frequently transliterating a French transliteration of a Hebrew consonantal group.

Two practical consequences follow.

Cross-referencing between sources requires attention to position rather than to spelling. The eleventh of the seventy-two is stable; what it is called is not.

And arguments that depend on the sound or shape of a particular name, claims about its meaning, its root, its resemblance to some other word, are running on a form that somebody chose. Anyone making such an argument should be working from the Hebrew consonants, and most of the popular literature is not.

None of this is unusual. It is the ordinary condition of any Hebrew material transmitted through Latin-alphabet occultism, and the seventy-two are no worse served than most.

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