Samuel ben Jacob’s Treatment of Exceptional Vocalic Shewas

In his paper Kim Phillips focuses on shewa signs that are pronounced as vocalic according to the Masoretic treatises in contexts where they would normally be expected to be silent. He examines how such shewas are represented by the scribe Samuel ben Jacob, who produced the Leningrad Codex and various other codices. The examination reveals that the scribe strove for graphic economy and was not completely consistent in the strategies that he adopted to represent the vocalic nature of the shewa in these contexts across the various manuscripts.