Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Ben wrote:
>
>  The key to verse 5 is in the word order. The verb is fronted for
> emphasis;

What do you think is the normal word order in Hebrew? To say that the verb
is fronted requires that it comes from somewhere else. And wherever else it
comes from, what it leaves behind is (on your analysis) subject-final. I'm
not saying I fully understand how word order works in poetry (assuming there
is even much of a system), but if anything I'd say the subject is out of
place (if in fact the subject is what you say it is), and it's generally a
lot harder to explain how something got moved to the end of a clause than
the beginning.

>  the subject of the verb,  DoWR `iQQe$ uWP:TaL:ToL a perverse and twisted
>  generation, comes last, in apposition to MuWMaM, their moral stain.

Do you mean that mumam is in apposition to the subject? (The direction does
make a difference, since we're trying to figure out what is the actual
subject of the clause.) But what does mumam mean, then? If the possessive
suffix refers to dor, then how can the noun be in apposition to it? I don't
see how they can possibly refer to the same thing.
>
>  So translate "A perverse and twisted generation, not my people - their
>  moral stain - has acted corruptly towards Him."

Are you suggesting here that lo banav is also in apposition to the subject?
(BTW, "not my people" seems like a rather free translation. I'd expect
something like "not his children.")

Perhaps a better analysis is to treat lo banav as the subject. Since it's
normal in prose for a pronominalized constituent to come between the verb
and subject, we seem to have pretty normal word order: "Those who are not
his children have dealt corruptly with him . . . " I think this works, not
because we can generalize an acceptable mismatch between the number of the
subject and verb, but because the negative compound is ambiguous. That which
is not "his children" could be singular, plural, or collective. It may be
that the context will clarify for us (and I think it does in what follows),
but by that point there's no need to go back and fix the verb.

I'm not sure whether I'd want to treat mumam as adverbial or as the
complement of the verb. I could see it going either way--because of their
blemish or they corrupted their blemish, in the sense that their corruption
produced a blemish. Either way, I think this line works well on its own,
seeming to treat the subject as a collective, since the verb is singular and
the pronoun is plural, probably ad sensum. The next line (or half-line, or
whatever you want to call it) clarifies the matter, as we're presented with
dor--an acceptable collective noun that probably refers to the same group as
lo banav.

Well, that's my quick attempt anyway.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics