Are the Peshitta vowels accurate?

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhay,

David - the vowels were not inserted until centuries later, and in certain cases (as with the Masoretic text) the interpretation was up to the discretion of the scribe, or the general community in regards to oral tradition.

A case that comes to mind of erroneous judgment is of course the "holy things" vs. "earrings" reading, where the scribe (and, perhaps, the entire community) was unaware of the special usage of the term in the Aramaic dialect of 1st-century Israel. We don't use this word in our dialect. A simple change of vowel markings completes the parallelism. And the current printed copies of the Peshitta, with their standardized vowels, are wrong in this one reading. And the mistake made its way into the Greek (pre-vowel points, of course.)

That's why Akhan Abudar asked if BOTH of our communities (Maronite and Mesopotamian) could have missed this independently. I'm afraid, if we are to complete the parallelism, the answer is yes.

There are probably other examples, I just haven't run across any - the scribes were pretty accurate.