PAUL FLESHER has a column in the University of Wyoming News on reading in antiquity and its various pitfalls that we don't think of today. Excerpt:

As late as the fifth century, for example, Greek was written in a continuous form with no breaks between the words. Nor did it yet indicate accents and breathing marks. Different accents and breathings changed the sound and meaning of the words being read. A reader had to know by memory the possible spoken words represented by the incomplete written code. The task of a Greek reader was to decipher the written text and render it into speech so it could be understood.

As Semitic languages, Hebrew and Aramaic had developed the practice of word separation many centuries before the Greeks. The problem facing these languages was that writing represented the consonants, but not the vowels. Readers had to know every possible oral combination of vowels that could be placed with a particular set of consonants to make valid, spoken words.

Readers had to choose the right vowels to give the right meaning. For instance, take the two consonants "R" and "N." One could supply vowels to make the present-tense "run" or the past-tense "ran." The letters could also stand for the boys name "Ron" or the girls name "Erin."

There's a classic illustration of both problems, which I sometimes use in my undergraduate classes. I write GDSNWHR on the board and ask the students what it says. The answer, of course, is supposed to be that it can say either "God is now here" or "God is nowhere," and without a context you can't tell which. But once one of them looked at it and said "Good snow here." (This was in Iowa.) Exegesis is always full of surprises.