Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From bshaw AT gpts.edu =====
>Dear Michael,
>
>The "enclitic mem" is essentially an extraneous "mem" that shows up at
>the endd of some words. The classic discussion of it is the article by
>Horace Hummel, "Enclitic Mem in Early Northwest Semitic, especially
>Hebrew," JBL 76:85-107. There is a good summary in Waltke-O'Connor
>paragraph 9.8, pp. 158-160.

Perhaps a little elaboration will be helpful. Enclitic mem doesn't tell us
much, does it? Enclitic simply means that it goes on the end of a word.
Mem--well, mem only tells us how it's written in a consonantal text. So,
that's not much help either.

The frustration becomes apparent when we turn to a language like Ugaritic,
where there seems to be a host of mems with various functions. Because
Ugaritic uses a more or less Phoenician orthography (basically no
representation of vowels, except that Ugaritic does have three forms of alef
that seem to indicate the following vowel), you can imagine what a mp noun
ending would look like--that's right, just a mem. But there are plenty of
places where the context militates against a plural form, or the form is
clearly feminine, or some such thing, and so we have a mem that can't be a
plural ending. So what's it doing? Sometimes we might find some locative or
adverbial force (which has support in other Semitic languages, but I don't
want to drift too far away from Hebrew here); other times, it seems like there
would be absolutely no difference if we read without the mem there at all. We
might guess that it's something like an emphatic mem (which is always a bad
idea, IMO), or we might simply say that we don't really know exactly what it's
there for. (One suggestion I've seen is that it's there to get the right
syllable count in poetic texts, but I haven't seen where that actually works.)

In Hebrew, we're usually a little bit better off because of vowels that help
us out, but we still have to admit ignorance in some cases. When that happens,
we call it an enclitic mem and hope that we haven't missed something terribly
significant by giving up.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics