A.Z. Foreman | The Ballad of Heshbon (Num. 21:26-30) read in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 2 years ago | Updated 22 hours ago
This may or may not be a very old text. Scholarly opinion is much divided as to what exactly it is: a taunt-song celebrating an Israelite victory over Sihon, an ancient Amorite victory-song celebrating Sihon's victory over Moab, an Israelite victory song celebrating the conquest of Moab, or a taunt-song referring to the defeat of Moab by some non-Israelite enemy. The great uncertainty is a function of the obscurity of several components of the last verse, where a text that ceased to be intelligible spawned multiple different attempts to make sense of it.
The pronunciation used here, Tiberian Hebrew, is a reconstruction of that used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee (the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record.) I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.
If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and make a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
This may or may not be a very old text. Scholarly opinion is much divided as to what exactly it is: a taunt-song celebrating an Israelite victory over Sihon, an ancient Amorite victory-song celebrating Sihon's victory over Moab, an Israelite victory song celebrating the conquest of Moab, or a taunt-song referring to the defeat of Moab by some non-Israelite enemy. The great uncertainty is a function of the obscurity of several components of the last verse, where a text that ceased to be intelligible spawned multiple different attempts to make sense of it.
The pronunciation used here, Tiberian Hebrew, is a reconstruction of that used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee (the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record.) I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.
If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and make a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
