Sod ha-nikud ha-nigleh: Hoc est, Arcanum punctationis revelatum (The Secret of the Vowel Points Revealed)
Leiden: Joannes Maire, 1624. First edition. Hardcover. Two parts, small quarto. Collation: (a)-(b)4, A-2T4 (= 176 leaves). [16], 332 [i.e. 330, pp.145-146 omitted from pagination; p.149 numbered 145, 153 as 149], [5, elenchus], [1, blank]pp. “Oratio de... Tetragrammato” with caption title. Woodcut printer’s device at title; lettrines, head- and tailpieces. Later calf, spine with raised bands, compartments tooled in gilt (title label worn with some loss; tear at head cap repaired). Occasional neat underlining and marginal emphases in an old hand throughout. An interesting copy, amply-margined and interleaved with heavier stock, upon which the title has been mounted. Text fine.
First edition of one of the most important and controversial works of seventeenth-century Hebraic scholarship, published anonymously with an introduction by the celebrated arabist Thomas Erpenius. “In the second and third quarter of the 17th century the attitude which an orientalist took towards the antiquity of the [Massoretic] vocalisation signs was to become a touchstone of his attitude towards the more strictly dogmatic opinions” (Van Rooden). The clarity and force of this seminal piece of scholarship is perhaps best described by William Orme, in his 1824 Bibliotheca Biblica: “This celebrated work, which first attacked the authority of the Masoretic points, stated all the arguments against them so fully and clearly, that it exhausted the subject at the first onset.” Here published anonymously, the Arcanum was reprinted in Cappel’s 1689 Commentarii et notae criticae in Vetus Testamentum (Commentaries and Critical Notes on the Old Testament). Van Rooden states that the Hebraist Wilhelm Schickhard (in the minutiae of an errata note in his 1625 Ius regium Hebraeorum) was the first to reveal Cappel’s identity as the author of the Arcanum. The work concludes with a reprint of Cappel’s 1614 "Oratio de ss. Dei nomine Tetragrammato YHVH ac genuina ejus pronuntiatione" (Oration on the Correct Pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton). The oration was reprinted in a 1707 compilation edited by Adriaan Reland, Decas exercitationum philologicarum de vera pronuntiatione nominis Jehova, comprising ten dissertations on the same topic, written by eight scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Very Good. Item #53306
References: J. L. Blau, The Christian Interpretion of the Cabala in the Renaissance, 108-09. Breugelmans, Maire, 1624:3. Orme, Bibl. Biblica, 81f. Smitskamp, Philologia Orientalis, 285. Detailed discussions of Cappel and the present work may be found in: S. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies; A. van der Heide (ed.), Hebraica Veritas (catalogue for the exhibition at the Plantin-Moretus Museum), p. 34 “Excursus 2: The Age of Masoretic Vocalization”; and P. T. Van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship, and Rabbinical Studies in the Seventeenth Century.
Hebrew title: סוד הניקוד הניגלה.
Price: $1,750.00