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  • From: George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>
  • To: Bill <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>
  • Cc: "b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Peqach vs Petah
  • Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2012 02:28:10 +0000

You're perhaps confusing פה with a heh and פתח with a heth. They are
semantically different and unrelated. One may open (פתח) the mouth to speak,
but open (פקח) the eyes or ears to let vision/sound in.


GEORGE ATHAS
Dean of Research,
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)


On 15/04/2012, at 1:51 AM, "Bill" <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>> פק×- to open in the sense of giving vision, hearing
>>
>> פת×- to open, the basic sense is to open a
>> hole, opening, door â?' 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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