Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Maurice A. O'Sullivan" <mauros AT iol.ie>]

At 15:45 26/09/2004, lehmann wrote:

> My question was not whether the Qal passive participle fulfills what is 
> deserved syntactically in Ps 90:8 or not. I simply want to know the reason 
> for lexicographers to parse as Qal pass.pt, though there is not a single 
> other Qal of this verb, and, in my opinion, even is very unlikely for 
> semantic reasons.

Reinhard:
I appreciate the point you are making ( and I doubt somehow if elementary 
remarks about participles are going to be any use to you <g> )

If you have access to the three-volume Anchor Bible treatment of the Psalms 
( Dahood ), you will find a cross-reference at 19:13
to 90:8>(alumenu<, where Dahood writes:
" >(alumenu< usually translated 'our hidden sins', but one should point out 
that the Targum understood the word as ' sins of our youth ' which is 
probably correct."

I notice, BTW, that the BHS crit. app. -- relying on "many mss. Aquila and 
Symmachus ... " renders it back into >(almenu< [ lamed unpointed ]

So, it looks to me as if between the Aramaic and the Greek, some 
"retrojection" has been carried out to achieve what in your original 
posting you termed " traditional parsing ".

Hope this is, at least, a pointer for you.

P.S
Dahood also footnotes the 2 volume work on the Psalms by Briggs, but I 
don't have this to hand.


Maurice A. O'Sullivan
mauros AT iol.ie
[ Bray, Ireland ]

"God does a lot of things in the Psalms
that He can't get away with in systematic theology."