Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jason Hare" <jason AT hareplay.com>]

Peter,

What if there was something to the fact that since the W and Y in the DSS
often look the same, then the actual reading of the DSS may not at all
disagree with the MT or suggest an alternative reading? In the DSS, the Y is
often written in exactly the same fashion as the W. Is that not the case in
the scroll(s) containing this passage?

Thanks,
Jason

From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: 22nd Psalm - Verb Object Again


> On 05/12/2003 02:48, Moshe Shulman wrote:
>
> > ...
> > The reading is K)RW, and this has some serious difficulties with it,
> > since the aleph makes it a poor conjugation for the verb KRH. I have
> > always considered this another example of poor writing skills, and the
> > correct reading should be K)RY, the last letter being an elongated
> > yod, a very common situation in the DSS. Otherwise we have a verb
> > without a root.
> >
> >
> More precisely, otherwise we have a hapax. How many hapaxes in the
> Hebrew Bible? I can give a simple answer to that: as many as 3220
> lexical items (including proper names), as distinguished in the
> Westminster morphological database, out of a total of 9521 lexical items
> - although many of these do have cognates with the same root. Even of
> the smaller number of hapaxes which have no known cognate with the same
> root, how many have been confirmed as genuine rather than scribal errors
> from cognate languages, ancient versions etc? It is simply bad logic to
> argue that a hapax implies a corrupt text.
>
> Actually I would consider that the LXX evidence proves that this word in
> question is a genuine hapax. It certainly proves that the Nahal Hever
> reading is more than the slip of one scribe's pen in the 1st century CE:
> the LXX translator, probably a century or two earlier and several
> hundred miles away, did not read K)RY, but read a 3rd person plural verb
> which strongly indicates a final vav.
>
> The LXX translator also read this verb as derived from KRH "dig" or
> something very similar. This may have been correct; or it may have been
> his or her best conjecture at a root whose meaning was already obscure.
>
> -- 
> Peter Kirk