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  • From: Bill <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Peqach vs Petah
  • Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:50:46 -0400

Karl and Pere,

Thanks very much for your responses, and for excusing my failure to use Hebrew fonts and unconventional transliterations sometimes.

I agree that the verbs in question probably aren't cognate - i.e., unless we attribute them to a primitive, monoconsonantal root consisting of peh alone

OTOH, as Harris, Archer, and Waltke point out in The Theological Workbook to the OT, petah appears with peh 'mouth' in Mic7:5, and petah is a form of patah 'to open' which appears twenty-three times with peh 'mouth' , six times with the saphah 'lips in the semantically equivalent phrase, and seven times with ayin 'eyes.

So I think that petah is certainly semantically identical to peqach.

Bill



At 05:09 PM 4/13/2012 K Randolph, wrote:


While I list the two terms as synonyms in my dictionary, they have distinctly different meanings as listed below.

פקח to open in the sense of giving vision, hearing

פתח to open, the basic sense is to open a hole, opening, door ⇒ to dig or engrave a hole, ditch, groove as in writing, furrow in field, carving in relief on a wall or door

As for Gesenius, he is wrong in so many places that I no longer take anything he wrote at face value. In fact, my dictionary started out as corrections in the margins of his dictionary as I read Tanakh through over and over again.

As for etymology, without clear examples to guide us, is mere speculation with a greater chance of being wrong than right.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 3:17 AM, Bill <<mailto:wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net> wrote:
Greetings!

I was just wondering if anybody could tell me whether the Hebrew
verbs peqach and petah 'to open' are today considered as cognate as
Gesenius claimed they are in his lexicon, and if so, what the
original root could have been.

Thanks very much for any insight anyone can give me into the origin
of these words and any possible relationship.

Sincerely,
Bill Schmidt





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