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  • From: "jeremy north" <jnorthct AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Matres Lectionis and Ordinals
  • Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 16:23:16 +0800


From: "Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>
Subject: Matres Lectionis
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 09:34:09 -0500 (CDT)

The difference between he-pathah.-taw-dagesh-sh AT wa-shin-h.ireq-`ayin-
h.ireq-yod in Jeremiah 36:9 and he-pathah.-taw-dagesh-sh AT wa-shin-h.ireq-
yod-`ayin-h.ireq-yod in Jeremiah 36:22 is a general difference in use
of supplemental "matres lectiones" letters in spellings, and does not
show any phenomenon that is specific to or exclusive to ordinals or
numerals (so that your subject line is rather infelicitous). Matres
lectionis are extremely simple on one level (their presence is merely
optional), but to try to really explain their detailed patterns of
occurrence and omission demands a large-scale study using high-powered
statistics; you could look at the Andersen and Forbes books, etc.

The only problem is that there seems to be a number of variations in the spellings of ordinals that may or may not be explainable as plene spellings. Take the feminine ordinal form for “seven”, for example, whose shorter spelling $B(YT is extended elsewhere to $BY(YT, but is also written as $BY(T (e.g., Ex 23:11, Lev 23:16, 25:4,20, Deut 15:12). In this sense, I wonder if the so-called "plene" spelling is combining the ‘yods’ of both variations, and hence represents a combined form rather than an matres lectionis expansion as such. It is interesting in this respect that Chronicles unusually prefers the shortened (defective) spelling of several ordinals (in contrast to its general preference for the plene forms of ordinary nouns), while the plene spelling of the same ordinals are found in abundance elsewhere in the OT (see James Barr (1989) in The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible, pp150-54). I wonder if, in some cases, scholars have been too quick to label certain spellings as being the result of matres lectionis when other processes may have been involved in their orthographic development.

Jeremy


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