Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor & Julie Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

> I am a student of Hebrew, having struggled while taking a seminary course
> and now trying to retain some knowledge and perhaps add a bit.  However, I
> am only able to devote 10 minutes every other day - so it comes
> very slowly.
> I have spent almost a year now working on a translation of Psalm 18:18-27,
> as I found it very difficult.  There were several problems I was
> not able to
> resolve.

Welcome to the list, Kevin.  I hope you learn some great things.  Let me say
first of all that I admire your perseverance.  A lot of people I know who
have taken Hebrew in seminary have hardly used it since.  But let me add
that you may want to struggle with some good prose passages before tackling
poetry.  (I assume you're not preparing a specific message on Psalm 18; if
you've been working on one for almost a year, you have better planning than
most!)  I suppose maybe there are some people out there who find poetry
easier to understand and work with than prose in their own language, but if
you're like me, you can deal with English prose a lot more comfortably than
poetry, and I think the same thing tends to hold true for Hebrew.

> I resorted to my copy of Beall/Banks/Smith Parsing Guide at
> several points, but for most of those, I am not able to justify the
> conclusions this book reached.

I studied under Beall and worked with Banks, so I don't mean any disrespect
to them when I say that a parsing guide can only do so much (and I hope they
would agree).  Especially in poetry, expect there to be ambiguities.  That's
partly why the extra time it takes to work out the parsing on your own is
always worth it.

> I would appreciate a dose of the expertise
> of this group as I post some of my questions over the next several
> days/weeks.  Any grammar insights would be appreciated.

I wouldn't call myself an expert on poetry, but I can at least give it a
try.  (And if my advice is bad, I'm sure someone will correct me!)
>
> Questions:
> 1) In Psalm 18:18a, in the word M")OY:B, I cannot understand why the Shewa
> appears, rather than a Tsere.

I think you missed a syllable.  Notice the yod at the end of the word and
the vowel under the bet.  It's me'oyvi, with a possessive suffix long-i.
When you add the stressed suffix to the end of the word, the long-e reduces.
(Two very important rules of vowel reduction in Hebrew are that when you add
a stressed suffix to a word, 1) long-a or long-e in the propretonic open
syllable (two syllables behind the stress) will reduce; 2) if that is not
possible (i.e., neither long-a nor long-e appears in a propretonic open
syllable), long-e in the pretonic open syllable will reduce.  It's not
always that easy, but this form at least is predictable.  Most introductory
grammars will probably cover this sort of thing in one of the first lessons,
wherever noun formations (plural forms, and such) are introduced.
>
> 2) In Psalm 18:18a the word (FZ has me wondering.  My Holladay
> Lexicon lists
> only one occurrence of this form in Genesis 49.  However, I don't see any
> other conclusion that to translate as the adjective "power".  What have I
> missed here?

This is probably a good time to put in a plug for expanding your collection
of lexica.  I like Holladay for a few reasons, not least of which is that
it's lighter to carry around than most of the others, and of course it can
be easier to find words, since they're not all jammed into root
configurations.  Still, for the price I think it's hard to beat BDB.  If you
don't have it, you should get it.  If you have it, you should use it.  And
actually, the two can be good complements to one another.  If I told you to
run out and spend $600 on HALOT, you'd probably have a good laugh.  Of
course, HALOT is good, and if you want a current, comprehensive lexicon in
English, it's hard to find a better one.  (Sheffield is far from complete,
so we thankfully don't have to argue the relative merits between those two!)
Now, as you probably know, Holladay is based on the predecessor to the
current HALOT, and in that respect, it can be quite a useful tool for one's
personal library.  By comparing Holladay with BDB, you can at least get some
sense of the different perspectives involved, and if it seems to merit
further investigation, you know to go find HALOT in a library and see what's
going on.

So, my recommendation for a tight budget would be to add BDB to your
collection and use the two as wisely as possible.  Now, back to your
question.  One problem with Holladay is that it doesn't give you a lot of
enlightening material to work with, and while its arrangement may be more
convenient for finding things, you won't necessarily benefit as much from
what you find.  BDB puts that same word from Genesis 49 in the entry on )OZ
as an alternate spelling.  (And it happens to be in pause, which I think is
interesting; but I don't know enough about the ins and outs of pausal forms
to work up an explanation.)  What that shows is that, at least in their
19th-c. opinion, this is something of an oddity and probably shouldn't be
considered seriously for your word.  (That's not to say that they're right,
but it's a suggestion, anyway.)  So what else might this word be?  Well,
right before it in BDB is an entry for )AZ--an adjectival form.  And its
pausal form (indicated by the inclusion of the atnach in the entry) seems to
lengthen the vowel to the form we find in your passage (which itself has the
atnach, so we may be on the right track).


Now, if you don't happen to trust BDB, you can check your introductory
grammar on pausal forms, and at least in Seow's presentation, the
lengthening of the a-vowel in a stressed syllable is in fact the first
change to watch for.  So, this is a "strong" enemy.  And really there's not
a lot else it could be.  The noun possibility that we put on the shelf would
seem to be impossible after all, when we stop and think about the fact that
you can't really have a noun with a possessive suffix in construct.
>
> 3) In Ps 18:18bWMI&&ON")AY seems to have a 1cs pronomial suffix which is
> used for plural nouns, yet this is placed on a singular
> participle.  I would
> expect, instead of AY that IY be used.  However, the subject in the
> following verb seems to shift to plural.

Okay, let's work through the forms.  umissone' is the singular participle,
while umisson'im is the plural.  After you add the suffix for singular
nouns, you get umisson'i, with reduction of the long-e in what is now the
pretonic syllable.   The plural form with the suffix loses its plural ending
to become umisson'ay, which looks like the singular form underlying but got
there by a slightly different route.  So in this case, the only way to tell
the difference is by the possessive suffix that's used.

Hope that's of some help.  I'll let the verb gurus on the list address the
use of the prefixal form at the beginning of the verse.  It seems like we
should expect a past-tense notion, so the rule of thumb that you translate
prefixal verb forms as future or present and suffixals as past needs some
sort of modification here.  There are a number of theories to deal with it,
but maybe you don't want to get into all that just yet.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics