Biblical Hebrew Forum

["jeremy north" <jnorthct AT hotmail.com>]

> 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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