Ninth, from the omission of Jerome.
Ninth, from the omission of Jerome.
§ 353. (IX) From the omission of Jerome. “Jerome makes no mention of the points. Therefore it is unlikely that they had come about at his time.” We respond. (1) In historical matters, an argument from negative authority is of little weight. (2) Jerome mentions neither the Masoretic work nor the Chaldaic paraphrases, yet Jerome is later than the authors of both. (3) Even if Jerome had received an unpointed codex from his teacher, the Jew Barrabanus (“written with extremely small characters,” as he says in the preface to bk. 7 of his commentary on Ezekiel), one could still not infer from this that public and authentic copies of the Bible lacked vowel points. (4) Some people try to prove that Jerome was not completely ignorant of vowel points. On Jonah 3 (vol. 5, p. 140) he writes: “I wonder quite a bit why it has been translated in this way since there is no commonality in Hebrew of letters, syllables, accents, or words,” where they claim in the notes to the index of the works of Jerome, at the entry Hebraeus, that with the word “accents” he understands vowel points. In Quaest. super Genes., he acknowledges that “an irregular point” was written above the word 
in Gen. 19:33. He says, “They put in, as it were, an incredible [point] and something that the nature of things does not grasp, that someone has intercourse without being aware of it.” But if he acknowledged an irregular pointing, he was hardly unaware of regular pointing. In bk. 7 of his commentary on Ezekiel, c. 27, vol. 4, p. 414, he writes: “Frequently, the Hebrew names are translated in various ways because of the diversity of accents and the changing of letters and most especially of vowels, which have their own properties among these.” In his Quaest. on Gen. 47:31, he speaks thus about the word 
: “In this passage, some people pretend in vain that Jacob bowed down to the head of Joseph’s scepter, namely, that, as he honored his son, he worshiped his power. However, it reads much differently in the Hebrew: ‘And Israel worshiped toward the head of his bed.’ “But the different meaning between 
, “scepter,” and 
, “bed,” cannot be noted and discerned except from the vowel points.
58 The Frankfurt/Hamburg edition repeats “334” for this paragraph and remains one less than Preuss’s paragraph numbers for the rest of this commonplace.
59 Read Rupellis instead of Kupellis. See Works Cited.
60 That is, the definite article.
61 In Deut. 6:4 of the Hebrew Bible, these two letters are printed in larger type.
62 That is, the argument is invalid. It begins with something particular and tries to demonstrate something general.