Reading the Ancient Hebrew scriptures was once much more confusing than it is today. This is because Ancient Hebrew text was not always written with vowel representation. Until around the time of King David and King Solomon, Biblical Hebrew was written without vowel representation, such that primarily only those who were specifically trained and familiar with the Ancient Hebrew texts could efficiently and accurately read them. As the Holy Scriptures began to become more widespread and widely available, this problem was recognized and attempts were made to introduce some ways to denote vowels in Ancient Hebrew writing.
As words in the Hebrew language are primarily based on three letter roots, the problem of not having a written method of expressing vowels can best be understood by looking at how a given three letter root may be read if the vowels in it are not specified. If we consider that there are five different vowel sounds in the Ancient Hebrew language, when we factor in all of the possible combinations of these sounds with a typical three letter word, that word could theoretically be pronounced in more than two hundred different ways!
Over the centuries two major solutions to this difficult problem were adopted so that ordinary people who were not as deeply familiar with the Ancient Hebrew texts could accurately decipher what was written. One of these ways was to introduce what are known as “Reading Mothers” into words. This term refers to specific letters, such as י, ו and ה, which were assigned the sounds of vowels and then placed inside or at the ends of words so that those reading them could better understand how a word should be pronounced. For example, the word קולות can be properly pronounced much easier (as “kolot”) with the ו’s than without them. Much later, around the 7th-9th centuries CE, a system of dots, known as niqqud, was developed by scholars in the city of Tiberias to ensure that Biblical Hebrew words were properly pronounced. To this day, the Torah is written without vowels, although most books and printed versions of the Holy Scriptures in Ancient Hebrew have vowels and niqqud printed in them.