Saturday, November 24, 2018

The case of the kiss and the dotted letters

DETAILS MATTER: Why Is Esau’s Kiss Dotted? (Prof. Albert I. Baumgarten, TheTorah.com).
Esau’s kiss to Jacob is written with scribal dots over the word וַׄיִּׄשָּׁׄקֵ֑ׄהׄוּׄ, “and he kissed him.” Traditional commentators suggest this hints to Esau’s feelings or state of mind. Critical scholarship, however, points to something much more prosaic, a question of syntax.
Those are old dots. Origen seems to have known about them in the third century.

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