Has anyone attempted to reconstruct the pronunciation / phonological form of the Torah as it would have been heard at the time of the fixing of the consonantal text (ca. 6th c. BCE)?
So, just as a little side project, I've been taking the diachronic processes given in The Development of the Biblical Hebrew Vowels by Benjamin Suchard (2016), and trying to 'work backwards' from the Tiberian reading tradition in order to arrive at the oldest stage of Hebrew which is consistent with the consonantal orthography of the unvocalized Masoretic Text. It's been a fun little project, and I've discovered some neat little diachronic quirks on my own. For example, the opening of the Book of Job, by using a combination of Suchard's relative chronology and the rest of my knowledge of Proto-Semitic, I've arrived at:
אִ֛ישׁ הָיָ֥ה בְּאֶֽרֶץ־ע֖וּץ אִיּ֣וֹב שְׁמ֑וֹ וְהָיָ֣ה ׀ הָאִ֣ישׁ הַה֗וּא תָּ֧ם וְיָשָׁ֛ר וִירֵ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים וְסָ֥ר מֵרָֽע ׃
ʔīʃ hājā baʔart͡sʼ-ʕūt͡sʼ; ʔejjōb ʃmō. wahājā haʔʔīʃ hahhūʔ tamm wajāʃār, wajareʔ-ʔəlōhīm, wasār merrāʕ.
'There was a man in the land of Utz; his name was Job. And that man was pure and righteous, and fearful of God, and shunned evil.'
Obviously, everything about this is highly speculative. I'm not an especially religious person, just a nerd with too much free time, so this isn't much more than a weekend hobby. But I was wondering if this sort of thing has been attempted before on a larger and more rigorously academic scale, and if so, where?
