Do all our chumashim have the same metegs and if so, who put them in?

[shmuel.fr...@gmail.com]

Do all our chumashim have the same metegs and if so, who put them in?

I notice when I look online at texts based on the Leningrad Codex, that many words in our chumashim have a meteg,  while  the Leningrad Codex (and perhaps the Aleppo Codex too), don't .

Gen 1:2  Hayta

Gen 1:7   HaRakiya

For example  the WLC  (which is based on the Leningrad Codex) 

https://tanach.us/Server.html?Genesis*          Has no metegs on those words

Neither does the Mechon Mamre site (Whose text may be based on the aleppo codex)

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm

Assuming all our chumashim all have the same metegs / same number of metegs in the same place, where do the publishers of our chumashim go to get their text with the meteg placements that they use?

[Jeremy Rosenbaum Simon]

There is no consistency, nor is there any expectation of consistency, even from the masoretic age. Some types of meteg or obligatory and expected to be marked in the same place in every manuscript by every scribe, but other types or discretionary. Sometimes that meant that there were two or three in a word in the scribe would just pick one of them, and sometimes, it might mean leaving it out altogether on a word.

As for our current texts, are the ones that are specifically based on particular Masoretic manuscripts, it just depends on what text a publisher used as his basis. Usually they don't say. I suspect that in many regards though, they can be traced back to Bomberg or Heidenheim. 

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[Art Roth]

Shmuel asked whether metegs are consistent across xumashim, and Jeremy answered that it shouldn't even be expected.

But shouldn't we expect consistency within any given xumash/Tana"kh across multiple occurrence of the same word (and of words that are similar enough to seem analogous in this respect)?  

This is a good opportunity for me to report on some "research" that I did two (or perhaps three) years ago, which revealed a shocking (to me) inconsistency in the Qoren Tana"kh in the sense that it treats certain words in Torah much differently from the way it treats those same words in Na"kh.  If I didn't know any better, I would suspect that the Torah section and the Na"kh section had separate editors, and they were getting their texts from two very different sources.  I'd welcome anyone's comments.

Ironically, I embarked on this "research" due to something I observed in Parshat Eiqev, which we just read last Shabbat,  Specifically, I noticed (in both Tiqun Simanim and the Qoren Tana"kh) that there is a meteg under the tav in tixyun (8:1) but no meteg under the yud in either occurrence of yixye (8:3).

Before that, I was under the impression that a meteg always (or almost always) appears in any form of the verbs hei-yud-hei (to be) and xet-yud-hei (to live) that satisfies the following two conditions:

     (a) The first letter of the shoresh (hei or xet) has a sh"va under it.

     (b) The previous letter (which is not necessarily the first letter of the word) has a xiriq or segol under it.  It is this letter which has the presumed meteg.

In the example cited above, this was true for tixyun but not for yixye --- and I wondered whether yixye was a rare exception or an example of a more widely occurring phenomenon that I was unaware of.

This intrigued me enough to spend a fair amount of time (perhaps 8-10 hours) using a Concordance to find every occurrence of every word that satisfies (a) and (b) in Tana"kh and look it up in the Qoren Tana"kh to see whether or not it has the expected meteg.  There are 1210 such words in Tana"kh --- 1124 for hei-yud-hei and 86 for xet-yud-hei.  In a small number (perhaps 3 or 4) of these cases, the letter in question has an actual trope (due to nasog axor) rather than a meteg.  For obvious reasons, I counted the meteg as being present rather than absent in these cases.  I emphasize that I was using only the Qoren Tana"kh and made no attempt to compare it to any other published Tana"kh.  

Before I talk about the results of this endeavor, I'll mention a trivial tidbit that I discovered as part of the process and found noteworthy.  There are 8 total occurrence in Tana"kh of the words sheyihye (5) and sheyihyu (3) --- and all 8 of them are in Qohelet. 

The attached Excel file contains the results of my "research" in all of its gory details for anyone who is interested, but here is an executive summary.

    1. In Na"kh, with very few exceptions, the expected meteg always appeared.  

     (a) For the verb hei-yud-hei, there are only 5 cases out of 683 (0.7%) where the meteg fails to appear.  Three out of the 5 exceptions are in the word nihy"ta, and there might be a reason to suspect that they are not exceptions at all --- the attached file has the details.  One out of the remaining two exceptions actually has a meteg, but under the letter preceding the one where I expected it --- again, details are in the attached file.  Since this word appears 9 other times, all with the meteg in the "right" place, there's at least some possibility that this exception is just a misprint.

                (b) For the verb xet-yud-hei, there were 3 cases out of 69 (4%) where the meteg failed to appear.

    2. In Torah, on the other hand, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that the meteg seems to be present or absent almost randomly, even from one occurrence to the other of the same word.  In other words, the word yixye in D"varim 8:3 (which motivated this whole exercise) is not at all unusual.

     (a) For the verb hei-yud-hei, the meteg is absent in 159 out of 441 cases (36%).  The word yihye, where the meteg "fails" in 69 out of 206 cases (33%) accounts for almost half of the 441 total cases.

     (b) For the verb xet-yud-hei, there are only 17 cases altogether (so not very much data), and the meteg is absent in 3 of them (18%).

Needless to say, the contrast between Torah and Na"kh is striking in both cases --- 0.7% vs. 36% for hei-yud-hei and 4% vs. 18% for xet-yud-hei.  Although the comparison is slightly less lopsided for xet-yud-hei, the discrepancy is still large enough to jump right out at you.

Art

[MG]

This is awesome. Thank you.

Unfortunately Qoren seems to be useless from a Masoretic standpoint.  Ditto to Simanim.  They don't identify their sources or their methodology, as Breuer does extensively in both his Mosad Harav Kook and Horev editions, and as Prof Cohen does in his Mikraor Gedolot HaKeter. 

I'm not sure why Qoren has been so well-received and considered so reliable, especially in the Yeshiva community.  Rav Belsky ZL in his Teshvos essentially disqualifies it (for the wrong reasons, IMHO, but still....), and it's internally inconsistent in a number of aspects.  I've heard alternatively that it's based on L (Rav Belsky writes this, and then subsequently claims that L itself is a forgery), or on Heidenheim, but even a cursory review of Qoren shows that it couldn't be based on either one of them in a consistent way. 

Even more so with respect to "our Chumashim", whatever that means?  Is this referring to Artscroll? I doubt that that those who typeset the shul chumashim have any clue about where to place gaayot, which is one of the most difficult aspects of Taamei Hamiqra.  The Stone Chumash is not based on Bomberg either; it's a hodgepodge of inconsistencies and cannot be taken as reliable in any meaningful way as far as the Mesorah goes.

Lastly, Breuer distinguishes between no fewer than 10 different types of gaayot, and there are Gaayat Chova and Gaayat Reshut (Gayyat Haya/Chaya fall into the Chova category I believe).  So in general one first needs to determine whether the Gaaya in question is a Gayyat Chova to begin to make comparisons.  Furthermore, it's not enough to look at the same word in two different places and assume there is an inconsistency; often times a Gaaya will appear depending on a number of factors, one of which is whether the ta'am on the word is a Mesharet or Mafsiq (I'd be curious how that breaks down in your study), the particular words surrounding it, and what part of a clause it's in.  These "rules" are very complex and have so many exceptions as to make the entire endeavor of coming up with rules useless.

[shmuel.fr...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, August 13, 2017 at 2:31:17 PM UTC+1, shmuel.fr...@gmail.com wrote:

Do all our chumashim have the same metegs and if so, who put them in?

I notice when I look online at texts based on the Leningrad Codex, that many words in our chumashim have a meteg,  while  the Leningrad Codex (and perhaps the Aleppo Codex too), don't .

Gen 1:2  Hayta

Gen 1:7   HaRakiya

For example  the WLC  (which is based on the Leningrad Codex) 

https://tanach.us/Server.html?Genesis*          Has no metegs on those words

Neither does the Mechon Mamre site (Whose text may be based on the aleppo codex)

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm

Slight correction..  turns out that mechon mamre link which is the mechon mamre bible most link to, has no markings at all,  hence no metegs on those words, or any.. however, 

Mechon Mamre has a tanach online with markings - trope, and those ones have  metegs like or similar to our chumashim.   

as their main page also mentions "The Complete Hebrew Bible (Tanach) in five editions in Hebrew (including one with cantillation marks)"

( ct in the link below probably stands for cantillation as in cantillation marks)

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/c/ct/c0101.htm

[shmuel.fr...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 16, 2017 at 8:42:04 PM UTC+1, MG wrote:

This is awesome. Thank you.

Unfortunately Qoren seems to be useless from a Masoretic standpoint.  Ditto to Simanim.  They don't identify their sources or their methodology, as Breuer does extensively in both his Mosad Harav Kook and Horev editions, and as Prof Cohen does in his Mikraor Gedolot HaKeter. 

A good thing with the feldheim simanim is it marks in the shvas as na or nach, and kamatz too.

Does Breuer's mark in whether a shva is na/nach?

Does Prof Menachem Cohen's mark in whether a shva is na/nach??

Also, according to this link which I quote below,  Prof Cohen's edition doesn't specify methodology.,

According to  http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-scholar-completes-definitive-version-of-the-bible/

"Rafael Zer, the project’s editorial coordinator, called Cohen’s work “quasi-scientific” because it presents a final product and does not provide the reader a way of seeing how it was reached. He credits Cohen for bringing an exact biblical text to the general public but said it “comes at the expense of absolute accuracy and an absolute scientific edition.”

Thanks

[MG]

Breuer and Cohen do not mark Shva Na/Nach, nor Kamatz Katan.  There is a tikkun published by Chorev which uses Breuer's text and does mark these things, supposedly according to Breuer's methodology as outlined in his seforim, but Breuer himself didn't put them in.  Many members here call this tikkun the "pseudo Breuer" tikkun... and we have even found places where it doesn't seem to conform to Breuer's methodology.

As far as Cohen's methodology, that's a cute link, but what Rafael Zer means is that they don't give you every single reason for the decisions they made about portions of the text, since we don't have the Aleppo Codex in its entirety.  It's not heavily footnoted with each variant and how much weight they assigned to various sources for each problematic piece of text.  Thus it's not scientific in that regard.  But, if you buy the first volume (Joshua/Judges), you'll see that there is a detailed description of their general methodology with respect to textual accuracy, what their source documents were, and why they generally chose one version over another for text we don't have extant.

As opposed to Simanim/Artscroll/Koren where they don't tell you what their source documents are, or even a cursory review of how they chose one variant over another.  They simply present text.

[shmuel.fr...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 29, 2017 at 6:19:25 PM UTC+1, MG wrote:

Breuer and Cohen do not mark Shva Na/Nach, nor Kamatz Katan.  There is a tikkun published by Chorev which uses Breuer's text and does mark these things, supposedly according to Breuer's methodology as outlined in his seforim, but Breuer himself didn't put them in.  Many members here call this tikkun the "pseudo Breuer" tikkun... and we have even found places where it doesn't seem to conform to Breuer's methodology.

As far as Cohen's methodology, that's a cute link, but what Rafael Zer means is that they don't give you every single reason for the decisions they made about portions of the text, since we don't have the Aleppo Codex in its entirety.  It's not heavily footnoted with each variant and how much weight they assigned to various sources for each problematic piece of text.  Thus it's not scientific in that regard.  But, if you buy the first volume (Joshua/Judges), you'll see that there is a detailed description of their general methodology with respect to textual accuracy, what their source documents were, and why they generally chose one version over another for text we don't have extant. 

As opposed to Simanim/Artscroll/Koren where they don't tell you what their source documents are, or even a cursory review of how they chose one variant over another.  They simply present text.

Thanks.. Do any of these texts have English explanations for their decisions / methodology?

[MG]

No, sorry.