The Vowels of Ancient Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew of Ezra and Nehemiah, did not have vowels. It had 22 or 23 consonants, depending on whether or not someone separate sin (שׂ) and shin (שּׁ.) Sometime between 500 and 1000 AD, the Masoretes, a Jewish group in Tiberias, along the Sea of Galilee, attempted to preserve Hebrew pronunciation by adding small dots and dashes around the consonant characters. These symbols were intended to add vowel sounds to the text without interfering with the text itself. For this reason most of the symbols were below a consonant, indicating a vowel sound that followed the consonant. Occasionally the symbol was just to the left of the consonant, between it and the next character (reading from left to right.) One symbol, the Holem, was above the consonant usually representing an oh sound. 

The vowel symbols were called "vowel pointing" or niqqud.

A first guide to these symbols is in the chart below. The added symbols are in red: they consist of Qamets (a small t) , Tsere (..), Holem (a dot above the character), Pathach (a short dash below the character), Seghol (three dots in a triangle, vertex down), Hireq (a single dot) and Qibuts (3 slanted dots.) Sometimes a Hateph (:) followed a symbol, so that we have a third line representing reduced vowels.

(This tabe is from the Quizlet page of leanejanelle; it is also on page 9 

of Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar, 3rd ed., by Pratico and Van Pelt.)

The full names for the symbols (as arranged in the table above) are:

(Other sources give slightly different names; one might find Kamets in place of Qamets, for example.)

Sometimes the Hebrew letter he (ה) was used at the end of a word to represent a vowel and the vowel pointing would include a Qamets, Seghol, Tsere or Holem with the letter he following (to the left.)

Sometimes the Hebrew waw (ו) would appear with Holem. There was also a Shureq symbol that involved waw. The Hebrew letter yod (י) could appear with Seghol, Tsere or Hireq.

At this point in my Hebrew education these symbols do not appear to have a rational or organized form (to me.) As I attempt to memorize these symbols, I am aware that there will then be exceptions ... and exceptions to the exceptions, something one would expect from a language as old as Biblical Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew deviates some from Biblical Hebrew; apparently the vowel pointing is rare and one is expected to recognize words just from the consonants. If one thinks that strange, I am reminded of early text messages that used abbrevations like thx and no one worried about the vowels! 😉