Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

 Tony Costa wrote,


>Dear Friends,
>
>  I had a question re: Prov 8:22 and the usage of the word QANAH. I noticed
>it is sometimes translated. "produced", "possessed" or "created". Any ideas
>on how QANAH should be transalted, in other words, what would be the best
>translation of QANAH?


Dear Tony,


In my first lecture to students of intermediate Hebrew, where I urge them
to do a linguistic analyzis of the texts they study, I often use Prov 8:22
as an example to show the importance of this. The rendering "possessed" is
a state and "created" is an action, and an analyzis of the verbal arguments
(subject/object) can help us choose between them. What is important, is the
syntactic function of R)$YT DRKW. If the words represent an adverbial, we
would have expected a preposition such as B; in that case QNH probably
would be a state (One possesses something *in* the beginning of one's
ways). However, the words hardly can be anything but an accusative
predicate, and this requires that it represents an action (One creates
something *as* the beginning of one's ways). The LXX takes the verb this
way, while the Vulgate takes it as a state.



Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo