Can you spot the difference? I guess you have realised that there is no difference except for the fact that you can see one means ‘fight’ and one means ‘bread’! However, let’s look at these words again adding in the vowel pointings underneath the Hebrew letters:
= fight
= bread
It is the vowel pointings that the Masoretes put into place to give the word its context and its meaning! The transliteration and its definition is as follows:
= lacham (to fight, do battle, make war)
= lechem (bread, food, grain)
This is why I always encourage any scholar of the Bible to invest in a credible Bible dictionary, e.g. Strong’s Concordance.
The te’amim can only be viewed in the Hebrew text, which
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Having said all of this, unfortunately the Masoretes did not supply instructions for interpreting these markings. Scholars agree that these markings at least serve to divide the text into sections and aid in the correct interpretation of the text. Scholars do believe they are cantillation markings but the markings differ in meaning from person to person and across geographical regions.
However, Haïk-Vantoura has her own theory on the te’amim. In her findings there is reference to the sublinear and superlinear te’amim. The sublinear te’amim are the te’amim markings found under the Hebrew text and the superlinear te’amim are the te’amim markings found above the Hebrew text these are not to be mistaken for the vowel pointings, which are a different set of symbols. This may take a little bit of study to differentiate the difference between the vowel markings and the te’amim. We will look into this later on in this chapter.
The chart below shows that there is an interaction between the sublinear te’amim shown in the left hand margin and the superlinear te’amim going from left to right across the page. There is a fixed pitch for the sublinear te’amim in comparison to the superlinear te’amim that has a relative pitch. This relative pitch is derived from the preceding sublinear