Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
>
> I must be tired, but I am not following you. I'm not strong on all
> diacritical marks.

That's what I was afraid of. I'll try to make myself clearer.

>
> >And for those who have no idea what I'm talking about: One of the
> >functions of the "cantillation marks" in the MT is that of punctuation
and
> >syntax - roughly what is done by periods and commas in modern writing,
but
> >not quite the same. In the MT, the Ten Commandments are divided into 13
> >verses - Ex. 20 2-14 (the English tradition divides the Hebrew vs. 13,
> >which includes "Don't kill" through "Don't bear false witness" into 4
> >verses and thus has a total of 16).
>
> HH: Counting by soph pasuq, I seem to get eleven MT verse divisions
> including Ex 20:2 and 20:16, which I count as the last commandment: 2,
3-5,
> 6, 7, 8-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.

Assuming you're using BHS, isn't vs. 17 ("Don't covet...") the 10th
commandment? In any case, your first mistake is in assuming that the "colon"
(:) is the soph pasuq. It isn't. The actual soph pasuq is the vertical line
(like a meteg) under the word. Look at the word )l-pny at the end of BHS's
vs. 3. The line under the nun is a soph pasuq. The critical note b says that
BHS's deletion of the : was according to Leningrad, but that most
manuscripts include it. The same is true at the end of vss. 4, 8, 9, and 10.
That's the "extra" 5, making 16.
Now look at the nun in )l-pny again. There's also a dot above it. This is a
revi`a, which indicates a minor division in the middle of a verse. The same
at the end of verse 4. Now obviously a word can't be both at the end of a
verse, as shown by the soph pasuq, and in the middle. This is what I mean by
there being two separate sets of markings superimposed on the same verses,
giving two seperate ways of dividing the verses.

 the MT also provides an alternate set of marks, in which each
> commandment is a single verse. This makes some, like the second and the
> Sabbath, quite long, by combining several "standard" verses, while in the
> case of "Don't kill" through "Don't bear false witness", each is a verse
of
> its own. This "upper" marking is made for those occasions in which this
> section is read publicly, in order to make the divisions of the
> commandments clear to those who hear.
>
> HH: Right, this is the one I was counting above. I don't see your first
> type of division. How is it determined?
Now do you see it?

> HH; I don't see how each word has two or more marks. By word do you mean
> individual word or commandment?

I mean each word.

> HH: I don't see that they are combined, except by the setuma. Couldn't the
> setuma just say that the two commandments are related.
>
Good point. The paragraphs follow the division into individual commandments,
and the first two (that is, vs. 2 and vss. 3-6) are combined in a single
paragraph. Could be part of the answer.

Yigal