Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

mathew anstey wrote:
>My question arises because of 2 Sam 12.3, "The lamb grew up with him
>and his children together." The problem with the Manner Adverb
>interpretation, is that it does not seem to be modifying the verbal
>predicate in any way (*The lamb grew up in a united manner with him
>and his children). It does not seem to tell us more about the
>situation of how the lamb grew up, but rather it modifies the locative
>prepositional phrase.
>
>Put another way, if I said, "How did the lamb grow up?" one could not
>answer "It grew up in a -yachdaw- manner". But if one said, "Where did
>the lamb grow up? one could answer, "with him and his children
>together." But since one could also just say, "with him and his
>children." it suggests that it may not even be a locative adjunct, but
>an extra-clausal / peripheral / tail constituent.

nice question.
i think the problem is the special nature of "yaHdav", it requires a
multiplicity of something to be united. consequently one cannot say *"the
lamb grew up 'yaHdav' " without further context, 
but you could say 'THEY grew up yaHdav', 
just like avraham and yitsHaq: 'and the two of them walked yaHdav'.
at 2Sm12.3 i read yaHdav as a second adverbial constituent that adds
intimacy to 'grew up (with them)'

as for extra-clausal, i wouldn't go so far. 
in context there is something 'extra', 
a parenthetical explanation, 
mipito ... from his bread ... which is marked as parenthetical by the
vavless intro (!).
plus the break in story flow is marked with three x-yiqtols, where each X
is a 'topic'=contextualizing constitutent. the prefix verbs naturally
describe the recurring nature of the events.

grammatically, the verse is very properly and quite fully signalled. 
a well-told story.

elef braxot
randall buth