Quotes from Angel Sáenz-Badillos

Analysis of Aleppo Codex ... represents the Ben-Asher tradition, having been vocalized by Aaron Ben-Asher himself.

The Pharisees deliberately avoided the Late form of Biblical Hebrew (LBH), which is the language of the Bible written after the exile, presenting their teaching in the language of the spoken vernacular.

According to J. Naveh, the Semitic alphabets originated with Proto-Canaanite (eighteenth to seventeenth centuries BCE), from which there was derived around 1300 BCE the Proto-Arabic script, the ancestor of the systems used in the South Arabian and Ethiopic scripts.

In addition to recording the actual changes in language ... the Masoretic pointing system also reflects the linguistic views of the Masoretes in a variety of ways, with evidence of Aramaic influence and of unduly subjective construction.

Phoenician writing is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite system, and from these developed the Palaeo-Hebrew script (c. 800 BCE) and the Aramaic script (c. 700 BCE), which was adopted by Hebrew after Babylonian exile.

The various systems of accentuation and vocalization introduced into the text of the Bible by the Masoretes had started to develop by about the sixth or seventh century CE. As is well known, from the the tenth century one such system eventually imposed its authority over the others, spreading from Tiberias to the entire Jewish world.

The earliest Hebrew texts that have reached us date from the end of the second millennium BCE.

The Israelite tribes that settled in Canaan from the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE, regardless of what their language might have been before they established themselves there, used Hebrew as a spoken and literary language until the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.

According to Bauer, the oldest form of the Semitic verb is the imperfect, which does not indicate 'subjective' or 'objective' time but rather 'every possible moment', since it is completely atemporal.

The exile marks the disappearance of this language (i.e., Biblical Hebrew) from everyday life and its subsequent use for literary and liturgical purposes only during the Second Temple period.

Archaic Hebrew ... earliest inscriptions dating as far back as the close of the second millennium BCE.

The language of archaic biblical poetry has obvious connexions with the poetry of the Canaanite north.

Archaic Hebrew ... no general agreement among scholars regarding this term.

The formation of a unified standard (biblical) text probably also involved the elimination of terms and structures that were too archaic to be understood so many centuries after the material had first been composed.

Biblical Hebrew is not a language in the full sense of the word but merely a 'fragment of language'.

There is general agreement that the differences between the Palestinian and Tiberian traditions are so great that they may even reflect separate dialects.

There have been various attempts to reconstruct the vocalization and pronunciation of classical biblical Hebrew, which certainly differs considerably from that established by the Masoretes fifteen centuries later.

Hebrew ... belongs to the Canaanite group of languages ... this means that when the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that country, at least for their written documents. Ancient traditions ... allude to Aramean ancestors (see Dt 26:5).

Most words in the Semitic languages can be completely defined in terms of root and pattern.

before the first millennium BCE one cannot speak of a contrast between Canaanite and Aramaic, but rather a group of languages with various features in common.

The end of the third millennium saw the arrival in the east of Amorite ... who settled west of Euphrates ... and used Akkadian in writing.

Various attempts have been made, with differing degrees of success, to reconstruct pre-exilic Hebrew, including its morphology.

The prevailing hypothesis continues to be that the Palestinian tradition is earlier than the Tiberian, although, under the influence of the latter, it developed forms that were closer to Tiberian ones.

In the passage where Jacob and his descendants ... final break from Laban (Gn 31:47), various writers have seen an allusion to the time when Israelites abandoned Aramaic and adopted the Canaanite language of the country they were living in.