Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Lee R. Martin" <lmartin AT vol.com>]

Dear Peter,

Sorry for the confusion. I guess the limits of e-mail cause us to
misunderstand one another.  I must not have read *your* posts well enough.

Lee R. Martin


Dear Lee,

I am sorry if I have misled you into thinking I am trying to disagree
with you. In fact I am trying to support the thesis which I thought
was yours by "reduction ad absurdum" of the counter-thesis: a desert
cannot tolerate and so the niphal of YR' does not include the
tolerative meaning component in itself. This meaning component is
indeed a function of the context.

"Fearful" is an adjective in English, but the Hebrew equivalent NOWRA'
is (at least in form) the niphal participle of YR', and is listed as
such by Brown-Driver-Briggs and by Holladay, by GKC section 116e, also
by the Westminster Morphological Database (newly released version 3)
and Harris-Archer-Waltke. VanGemeren writes: "The ni. part. form of
the vb. yr' I appears 44x throughout thr OT. It functions
grammatico-semasiologically as n adj. ..." Presumably Even-Shoshan (I
don't have this book at hand) has taken the acceptable alternative of
listing NOWRA' as an adjective. That choice is perhaps unfortunate in
this case as it begs the very semantic question which we are
discussing, that is if the "tolerative niphal" can apply to niphal
participles.

Peter Kirk