The Scholarly Care in the
Thirty-Year Labor
Translating the Orthodox Jewish Bible

Part One

What Is a
Mater Lectionis?

In the earliest Hebrew manuscripts, vowels were not written. A reader trained in the tradition knew how to pronounce the consonantal skeleton — but readers at a greater remove from the spoken language could not. To assist them, the scribes conscripted four letters — א, ה, ו, י — as what Latin grammarians would later call matres lectionis: "mothers of reading." These letters were inserted not to be pronounced as consonants, but to carry a vowel sound on the page, anchoring a long vowel that would otherwise be invisible to the eye.

The practice is called scriptio plena — "full writing" — as opposed to scriptio defectiva, "defective writing," which omits the vowel letter and trusts the reader to supply it. Both spellings represent the same word, the same pronunciation, the same meaning. The difference is orthographic, not phonemic.

The Orthodox Jewish Bible (OJB), translated over thirty years by Dr. Philip Goble, engages the Hebrew text at precisely this level of granularity — attending not only to the meaning of roots but to their orthographic history, their scribal variants, and the way manuscript traditions encode theological significance in spelling itself. The case of Psalm 22 is the finest illustration of why this matters.

Part Two

קָאם in Hosea 10:14 —
The Aleph as Vowel Carrier

The root קוּם (qûm, "to rise, stand up") is one of the most common verbs in biblical Hebrew. It is a hollow verb: the middle letter is ו, which is part of the root itself. In the standard Masoretic Text the verb is pointed and spelled in the expected way throughout most of the canon.

But in Hosea 10:14 the form appears as קָאם. The aleph here is not a consonant being pronounced — "qa-AM" is not a distinct word from "qûm." The aleph is functioning as a mater lectionis for the long ā vowel (qāmets). The scribe has inserted א to visually anchor the vowel, producing scriptio plena. Phonetically, the two spellings are identical.

This scribal practice is not an error, nor a distinct dialect word. It is a recognized convention found across non-Masoretic and dialectally variant manuscripts — particularly in texts produced by communities that preferred fuller spelling to assist readers less familiar with the spoken language. The Qumran community, for example, wrote plene spellings routinely. The translator who misses this will mistake a spelling variant for a different word. The translator who understands it reads the text as its original community intended.

Part Three

The Root כּוּר —
To Dig, Bore, Pierce

The Hebrew root כּוּר / כָּרָה covers a tight semantic field: to dig, to bore out, to hollow, to pierce through. It is the verb used for digging wells, for boring through rock, for the action of a pointed instrument penetrating a surface. The mechanical idea is that of sustained, deliberate penetration — not a slash but a bore, not a cut but a dig.

The same root also appears in the Arabic cognate kāra and in Aramaic, consistently carrying the sense of boring and piercing. It is not a poetic word — it is a craftsman's word, the word a well-digger or a stone-mason would use. When it appears in a psalm describing the extremity of bodily suffering, its meaning is concrete and physical.

Part Four

כאר — The
Mater Lectionis Variant

Now apply exactly what Hosea 10:14 demonstrates. The root כּוּר is a hollow verb whose interior ו carries a long vowel. Exactly as a scribe may write קָאם for קוּם — inserting א to carry the long ā vowel visually — so another scribe may write כּאר for כּוּר. The consonantal skeleton shifts from k-w-r to k-ʾ-r, but the aleph is not being pronounced. It is a vowel marker. The word is identical.

This is not a hypothetical or theoretical substitution. The aleph-as-mater pattern for hollow roots is well attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in other Second Temple period manuscripts. Scribes working in the plene tradition — particularly those at or affiliated with Qumran — applied this convention broadly. The scroll that became the foundation text for one of the most contested verses in the entire Bible was written by precisely such a scribe.

Adding the standard 3rd person masculine plural suffix וּ to the plene base כּאר yields the verbal form:

Part Five

כָּארוּ יָדַי וְרַגְלָי —
The Crux of Psalm 22:17

Psalm 22 is among the most theologically dense poems in all of Scripture — a lament psalm of David that describes suffering with an almost unbearable physical precision, and which the New Testament writers understood as Messianic prophecy fulfilled in the crucifixion of Yeshua. The passage most contested is verse 17 in English enumeration (verse 16 in Hebrew): a description of the Psalmist's hands and feet.

The textual question is simple to state and profound in its implications:

The Masoretic pointing כָּאֲרִי and the variant כָּארוּ differ by a single final letter — י versus ו — a distinction of one stroke of the pen. In an unpointed manuscript, the two are visually very close. The question of which preserves the original reading is therefore a genuine text-critical question, not a confessional one.

Part Six

The Nahal Hever
Dead Sea Scrolls Witness

Nahal Hever is a desert canyon on the western shore of the Dead Sea, in the same Judean wilderness that sheltered the Qumran community. Its caves yielded manuscript caches dated from the late first century BCE through the early second century CE — the very period of the Second Temple's destruction and the aftermath. These are not medieval copies; they are manuscripts contemporary with the New Testament itself.

The orthography of the Nahal Hever reading is precisely what the pattern of scriptio plena predicts. The scribe writes כארו — consonants kaph, aleph, resh, vav — where the aleph is a mater lectionis for the long vowel of the hollow root כּוּר, and the final vav is the 3mp suffix. This is exactly the pattern Hosea 10:14 displays with קָאם. The same scribal hand that writes qāʾam for qûm writes kāʾarû for kārû.

Part Seven

The Complete Chain —
From Root to Revelation

The full argumentative arc can now be drawn from the ground up. Every step rests on the kind of detailed, patient engagement with the Hebrew text that the thirty-year labor of translating the Orthodox Jewish Bible required — not only knowledge of what roots mean, but how they behave across orthographic traditions, how scribal conventions encode the same word in different orthographic dress, and how manuscript evidence from the Judean desert changes the landscape of textual interpretation.

The OJB translator, working with these tools — knowledge of hollow roots, familiarity with scriptio plena conventions, awareness of the DSS manuscript tradition, and fluency in the LXX as a textual witness — can navigate this passage with the same confidence a lawyer navigates a contested document when three independent sources agree on its reading. The text-critical case for "they pierced" rests not on faith but on philology.

For the Orthodox Jewish Bible — a translation shaped by Yiddish, Hebrew, and Hasidic idiom, written to present Yeshua of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah within the idiom of his own people's textual tradition — Psalm 22:17 is not a proof text imposed from outside. It is a Hebrew poem, preserved in a Hebrew manuscript, rendered in Hebrew verbal form by a Hebrew-writing scribe at Nahal Hever, describing an event the New Testament identifies as the crucifixion. The philology and the proclamation point in the same direction.

This is what a thirty-year labor looks like at its most precise: not merely consulting a lexicon, but tracing a single variant through orthographic convention, manuscript tradition, and ancient translation to arrive at a reading that is both philologically defensible and theologically luminous. The OJB was built one such decision at a time.