No, it’s from Tiberias.
For the past millennium or so, the entire Jewish world has made use of the text of the Hebrew Bible as vocalized by the Tiberian Masoretes. Two great recent (Open Access!) books on the Tiberian tradition are Khan (2020) on the Tiberian pronunciation tradition as a whole and Hornkohl (2023) on the date when the forerunner of the Tiberian reading tradition was fixed. Current thinking is that once the reading tradition took a firm shape in the Second Temple Period, it was orally transmitted during the centuries before it was fixed in writing.
But where was it transmitted?
I think everyone’s implicit assumption, mine included, is that the Tiberian tradition was transmitted, well, in Tiberias, or somewhere in Galilee at least. Tiberias was a major centre of Jewish learning in the late Roman period, it was a major centre of Jewish learning in the early Middle Ages… just connect the dots. But recently, I’ve started to wonder how plausible that is.
Under the Eastern Roman Empire, with Nicene Christianity as its state religion, things weren’t so great for the Galilean Jews. A reliable-looking Wikipedia page with sources I haven’t checked informs me that besides earlier legal restrictions, the greatest Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian I (527–565), ordered the conversion of all synagogues in the empire to churches and forbade the reading of the Torah in Hebrew. While these laws may not have been followed in practice, this does not seem like a very conducive atmosphere for meticulously preserving the pronunciation of every word of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. A failed revolt against Heraclius in the early seventh century is also said to have devastated the Jewish communities of Palestine. All this after a law by Theodosius I at the beginning of the Eastern Roman period that (once again as per Wikipedia) harshly outlawed the consecration of rabbis, which might explain why Palestine sees basically no rabbinic activity at all during the fifth century (Cohen 2022, paywalled).
The Jews of Babylonia, meanwhile, were doing pretty OK, admittedly with some disturbances in the late sixth century. And we know that a precursor of the Babylonian reading tradition, which is very similar to the Tiberian one, was already in place at that time because of the way Bible quotations are spelled in Late Antique magic bowls (Molin 2023). As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in this evidence that precludes the tradition reflected here from being an ancestor of the Tiberian tradition.
After the “missing” fifth century, contacts between the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia are restored, and we practically always find influence going from Babylonia to Palestine, especially in the form of scions of important Babylonian families gaining positions of power in the Palestinian community (Mar Zutra as ‘Head of the Convocation’; others as Gaon of the Palestinian Yeshiva, once that gets established). I don’t think we see that kind of influence in the other direction at any point later than the third century.1
Like I said, the Tiberian and Babylonian reading traditions are very similar. Kantor (2023) classifies these two traditions together, separate from every other Jewish reading tradition from Antiquity:
While Kantor thinks this may reflect a “Proto-Masoretic” vs. “vulgar” social distinction, it is interesting that the “vulgar” traditions are all from Palestine, while the Babylonian magic bowls show no sign of vulgarity. We could also explain the data by saying that Tiberian and Babylonian just share a more recent ancestor than the one they share with the (other) Palestinian traditions. Given the usual direction of transfer, I think it’s more likely that someone took this ancestor from Babylonia to Tiberias than vice versa. The Palestinian pronunciation tradition (especially evidenced in the very Palestinian and non-Babylonian genre of piyyut!) would then be more indigenous than the Tiberian one and have been given up over time in favour of the prestigious new import.
A Babylonian pedigree for Tiberian Biblical Hebrew can also be marginally supported by a comparison to Rabbinic Hebrew. While we find Rabbinic Hebrew in both Palestinian and Babylonian sources, there’s some linguistic differences between these two corpora. Many don’t apply to Biblical Hebrew, but one I can think of involves the plural of nouns in –ūṯ, like malḵūṯ ‘kingdom’: Palestinian Rabbinic Hebrew has forms like malḵiyyōṯ, Babylonian has malḵūyōṯ. The Babylonian form is what we find in Tiberian Biblical Hebrew (Dan 8:22).
The Tiberian tradition probably shows some influence from Greek, both in the consonants (Kantor & Khan 2022, paywalled) and in the vowels (Suchard 2021). That can hardly have happened in Babylonia, and sure enough, the Babylonian tradition doesn’t show these contact effects. If the Tiberian tradition was imported from Babylonia, it would be nice for that to have happened during the Eastern Roman period, when Greek was still the official language, but that brings us right back to the problem of the hostile environment. I guess Greek stayed around long enough in the early Islamic period that it could have happened then. It weakens the argument, but I think it still works.
So, was the Tiberian reading tradition imported from Babylonia? For now, I think the evidence leans towards כֵּן/כ̈ן. I’m still reading up on a lot of the historical background, so if you have any arguments pro or con, please do let me know in the comments.
- R. Saadia Gaon also imports a lot of Palestinian traditions to Babylonia, but that’s far too late to explain the similarities between the Tiberian and Babylonian reading traditions. ︎