Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

>In Gen 17.16 we find both these expressions:
>
>       uberaktiy 'otah         "I will bless her"
>       uberaktiyha             "I will bless her"
>
>There are many other examples like this where the pronominal object is
>expressed with the same verb in these two different ways. My questions
are,
>Does anyone have any theories as to the difference between these two
>structures? and, Does anyone know of any articles or books that discuss
this
>phenomenon?

three basic approaches are used: 
1. the chronological/dialectical, e.g. polzin on late biblical hebrew who
notes statistical deviance in this feature between 1st/2nd temple hebrew. 
2. another approach is 'textlinguistic', the cliticized object is more
fully processed, more assumed, or less-actively  thematic. see longacre
"joseph" for some discussion on these lines.
3. poetic balance/weight.
i find that 1 and 3 do not provide much help in this passage. the second
approach needs more work but is in the right direction.
braxot
randall buth