Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

thank you, bryan, for some delightful innovation.
a flower will sprout and grow.

The grade, I hope, is superfluous. 

Questions/comments on the text go in three general directions:
a. details of form, grammatical correctness
b. choice of vocabulary or construction, style.
c. translation/intended communication

I will label comments below with -a-, -b-, -c- to point out the type.

>1. (title) hatsitsah le'ariyel 
 -b- nice word, but tsits and peraH are more common. 
  [NB: plural tsitsim must be avoided because of Modern Hebrew slang for
women's breasts 
(it comes via yiddish not BH).]
-b- ariyel is more a boy's name, though used for Jerusalem in Bible and is
also a cultic object. Today we use ariyela. 
 [This raises a continual problem, whether to push BH to where it probably
was, or could have gone (i.e. into the black holes of the language), or to
conform to later usage. Here, I would choose a different name that is
clearly feminine.]

>2. 'ariyel halak:t `al haderek 
 -a- halexa [a.k.a.:'halekah'] is best, or holexet
 -b- badderex instead of `al hadderex.
 -c- 'walker' is not good English. In Hebrew I would assume that the
storyteller is already telling us about one particular incident on one
particular day.

>3. vatishax lareyx 'et tsitsah
 -a- lehariaH 'to smell' 
 -a- ha-tsitsah , article is necessary with et, and et is necessary for one
of the characters of the story. 
on the other hand, lehariaH ha-tsitsah, without et but with 'ha-', is
possible for something marginal.
 -c- (unless poetic 'she bent down at the smell of ... kafefa lereaH ...)
 -b- shaH (qal) and nashaH (nif`al), are problematic, they are poetic for
being low, dishonored, in mourning. 
   for literal, try:  
kare`a/vattixra`  'she crouched down', or 
kafefa/kappa/vattaxof 'she bent over'. 
  another word, (possibly more literal than *sh-H-H ), and very rare in BH,
would be shaHeta/vattIshaH (vattishaH: accent on '-ti-', from li-shHot 'to
bend down' *sh-H-h ). 
  all the above is why we use   le-hitkofef   today. :-)

>4. vehineh hatsitsah dibar:t
 -a-  dibbera 
 -b-  vehinne dibbera ha-peraH.  vehinne with suffix verb strongly prefers
VS order, especially since the surprise is a completed event rather than an
on-going process.
 -c-  "And behold, it was the flower that was a speaker (X-qatal)" The flow
of the story would be the single event of speaking here. There is no focus
on flower as though distinguishing from among two assumed speakers.

>5. vato'mer
>6. boqer tob 'ariyel
-b- anachronistic, but nice. shalom lax, ariel-, yevarexex ha-shem.
of course, only encouragement here to the student. I let my students use
such modernisms as long as they know that boqer tov is 'our style' and not
BH. Jeremiah would have understood,  --and disagreed :-)

>7. vatdaleg 'ariyel
 -b-  this is close according to attested BH (=ariyel jumped up and down,
back and forth'). A 'black hole' (missing word/idiom) probably exists here
for a single 'jump'. vattidlog would be better for 'to jump', or else
vattibbahel 'was confused', vattiddahem 'be startled, stunned', vatteHrad
'and she trembled, got scared'.

>8. vatits`aq
>9. vataber hatstitsah 'el 'ariyel le'mor
 -a-  a typo for vattedabber.

>10. 'al tir'i
>11. 'ani re`ak
>12. vato'mer 'aiyel
>13. 'otak 'abi' lebeyti
-b-  good choice of syntax

>14. vatabi' 'ariyel 'et hatsitsah lebeytah.
>15. vatiqra' shemah. re`i

She is on her way to learning Hebrew. 
yafe `asitem.

braxot
Randall Buth