The person talking about removing all the vowels and reducing a word to just three or four consonants was somehow semi-correct in describing Hebrew.
In the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, some Ethiopic languages, and Aramaic, the language Jesus Christ probably spoke) you have "stems". Take, for example, the Arabic stem
k-t-b, meaning
write. Now, from this stem, vowels are added as diacritic marks; the Semitic languages don't have particular characters for vowels. So the
k-t-b stem could mean
kitab "book",
kutub "books",
katib "writer",
kuttab "writers",
kataba "he wrote",
yaktubu "he writes", etc., depending on how one places the vowels. So, for example, in
this Hebrew paragraph the letters are consonants and the dots and dashes above/below them are the vowel markers.
Hebrew wasn't always like this, however. Originally, the earliest Hebrews easily read the Torah without any problem, since they knew the stories by heart. But later generations, as Hebrew became more a literary language and Jews spoke Aramaic or Greek, they started having problems remembering the vowels. For example, if I say my favorite podcast is
Th F Pls, I would know the missing vowels and understand
The F Pls to be
The F Plus. But my great-great-great-great-grandchildren might not know this, and
Th F Pls could be read as
Thou Fee Pulse or whatever. (It's a dumb example, whatever.) So later Hebrews went through the text and added the vowel markers.
Knowing this, one can make sense of some otherwise seemingly bizarre or incorrect passages from the Bible. For example, during David's fight against Goliath, the latter was wearing armor and a helmet, while David only had a sling. The text says David slung a stone at Goliath and hit Goliath in his
metzach, or forehead. But there's a problem here. Goliath's helmet would have had a strip of metal covering his brow and extending down his nose,
not unlike this Greek (Corinthian) helmet. How could David had hit Goliath in his forehead if Goliath was wearing such a helmet? Well, with different vowel placements,
metzach is extremely similar to
mitzchah, the word meaning greaves, his leg armor. (Both words come from the step
m-tz-ch.) Now, this makes more sense! If David had hurled the stone into Goliath's greaves, between the armor itself and his flesh, he would not have been able to bend his knee and would have been knocked off balance due to the weight of his amor, giving David the opportunity to draw Goliath's sword and behead him, as David does in the Biblical narrative. So this was likely the earliest version of the story, but the later Hebrews misplaced the diacritic vowel markers, and changed the meaning of the word and a key detail of the story.
Sorry for the linguistic/Biblical derail, but I thought others would find this as interesting as I do.
