Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "C. Stirling Bartholomew" <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>
To: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 8:12 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: Diggers


> On 5/3/04 11:13 PM, "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il> wrote:
>
> > By the way, BHS comments that there are some manuscripts that have one
word,
> > as do Qumran and the translations.
>
> Yigal,
>
> Yes, I saw that and wondered about it. Why "some manuscripts" and why not
> cite them by name?
>
> After the discussion of reduplicated pairs of consonants the argument that
> the MT editors would stumble over "prpr" in lxprprwt sounds rather weak.
So
> how do we account for the MT reading?
>
>
> greetings,
> Clay Bartholomew
>

My guess would be that it is a very late (8-10 century) scribal error that
made it's way into whatever the source of the Leningrad Codex was, and from
there to most standard printed Bibles. It seems also to be in the Aleppo
Codex, though I have not yet had a chance to check a good edition. I would
guess that a scribe simply put too large a space between Xpr and Prt, and
"created" a two word combo, which the very latest of the Masoretes then had
to add dots and marks to. As I've said, Rashi seems to treat it as one
word -
that is, he explains what kind of mole it is, and sees no reason to explain
the two word form. He may have had a manuscript in which it was still one
word.

Yigal