What’s With the Black Hebrew Israelite “Shalawam” Instead of “Shalom”?

Important point, said with all due respect to my family who identify as “Black Hebrew Israelites” and the like…

I see many people writing things like “Shalawam” and the like, for “Shalom.” I have been told that this is because they believe the vav was never used to carry vowels sounds. This, of course, is not a historical view, but is part of a selling point that is used by various ideological recruiters, in order to act like they have some “inside” knowledge of ancient matters that no one else has.

Though it is an argumentative fallacy to “appeal to authority,” i should note that my first masters degree is in Near Eastern Religion and Languages (our program essentially had a major/minor focus like this). As such, while i am far from the best linguist in Semitic languages, i do know a thing or two.

This is true in terms of consonantal vowels – which ALL Semitic languages lack – but in pronunciation, ALL Semitic languages have all of these vowels.

Every Semitic writing system is what is known as an Abjad – languages in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels.

As for the F sound, which is sometimes commented upon in these circles, it is the dominant use in Semitic languages, with the P variation being secondary. Thus, Arabic has only F and no P sound associated with the same letter.

We must remember that the written Semitic languages are not the whole of the unwritten dialects. This is a particular feature of Semitic languages – which first existed as unwritten dialects and once a writing system was ascribed to each of them, the letters were merely secondary indicators of an already widely-known and well-preserved oral dialect tradition. So the full articulation of every sound was never needed – just as it is not needed AT ALL in Chinese, for example. We have to get out of Western modes of thinking about Alphabets and languages if we want to understand non-Western languages.

Sound indications expanded in both Hebrew and Arabic, as time went on. This doesn’t mean that the “Qur’an without dots” – as we see in the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts – only had a handful of letters… it means that those dots were not yet used to distinguish certain letters that were known by oral traditional teaching of the Arabic dialect. Those sounds were still all there, they just were not expressed yet with dots or diacritical marks.

That system of placing colored dots above certain letters to differentiate consonants in the Arabic language (because several letters share the same shape and even more look identical depending on their placement in a word), was implemented by Abu al-Aswad al-Du’ali (603-689 C.E.), through the use of consonant differentiation, called I’jam or naqt marks. He didn’t invent new consonants then, he just implemented a way to standardize indication of them in writing.

Vowel indication, called tashkil, was a later invention still… but everyone knows that this was a later written invention, just as it was in Hebrew, in neither language was this the origin of such vowel usage. These simply were primarily-oral languages, historically, so vowel indicators were not necessary until writing became much more widespread. The tashkil vocalization system was developed by Al-Khalil ibn Ahmed al-Farahidi (d. 786), but no Arab in history has ever argued that these vowel sounds were not used orally before him. So too is this the same in the case of the Hebrew language and vowel points.

Ethiopian Ge`ez has even more vowel variations, which only found written expression in more modern Amharic letter variations than what we found in the ancient. It doesn’t mean those sounds weren’t used in the ancient Ge`ez, it means they were preserved orally without need of writing indicators for each sound until writing became more wide-spread.

I say this with an intention of gentleness and love. The Black Hebrew Israelite identity is one which stems from your lost, disconnected roots with your Igbo (pronounced: “Heebo”) ancestors, from before the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade’s human trafficking. Just as in ancient Egypt, the Children of Israel were subjugated by the “Two Constrictions” of Mitzrayim – both physical AND spiritual bondage, you have been robbed of this aspect of your heritage – along with your Mandenka Muslim roots, for that matter. Many of you are longing to rediscover these roots. But don’t fall for cheap knock-offs. Dig deep and get to what you actually crave. Accept no substitutes. If you would like to take the next step in that, feel free to contact me for a free copy of “Blueprints of the Messianic Era” volume 1.

Shalom. Salaam. Peace.