Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <vadim_lv AT center-tv.net>]

I assume there are many around here who believe that Hebrew (or its earlier 
form, say, Ugaritic or even Accadian) is a naturally derived language.

Anyone, please explain me this puzzle about the roots.

If the words indeed developed from cavepeople mumbling, we would expect them 
to be of different length. This what happens in Germanic with their long 
history as evolving, living languages. However, more or less all Hebrew words 
have three-letter roots. How is it possible that "accidentally," from 
mumbling, all the words are "exactly" three-letter long? Roots of a "fixed" 
length seem an evidence of artificial derivation.

To develop three-letter roots, there must have been a concept of letter. It 
is well-known, however, that people did not have this concept until very 
late. The concept of isolated letters developed only after long periods of 
syllabic and acrophonic writing.
Perhaps the roots were originally of varying length, and adjusted to three 
letters only late? No evidence for this. Besides, this would also have been 
an arbitrary decision.

Forming stems with prefixes seems a centralized decision. I can imagine how a 
cavemen one morning decided to add hey to produce casuative, perhaps by 
analogy with directional suffix hey. But how did he convince others to follow 
the suit? One could invent a word, and it slowly drifts down, becoming 
popular, right. But this development seems less plausible with stems.

But, while natural derivation of stems is at least imaginable, it eludes me 
how the fixed-length roots could derive naturally. I don't remember 
encountering any scientific explanation of the origin of these roots.

Vadim Cherny
>From leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il  Thu Dec 23 04:04:04 2004
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From: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
To: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] red heifer
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 11:02:53 +0200
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Thanks Marianne,

I have read that the Egyptians used to burn red-haired men and cattle and
scatter their ashes at the grave of Osiris. However, the sources cited were
Diodorus and Herodotus, not Egyptian. If you have any real Egyptian
references I'd be grateful.

Yigal
----- Original Message -----
From: <MarianneLuban AT aol.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] red heifer


> In a message dated 12/22/2004 5:45:37 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il writes:
>
>
> >
> > All very intersting, but my question was, why the translators took such
a
> > general term as "cow" and translated it as the more narrow "heifer". Did
> > they have any reason to think that this particular cow was special in
any
> > way, besides its color?
>
> It seems to me that the red cow was something left over from the pagan
> religion of the Canaanites.  I recall that a certain goddess was called
"the red cow
> of Baal", perhaps Baalath, herself,  but I would have to check that.
> Unfortunately, I am leaving on vacation today and don't have much time--
but I
> remember thinking of the "red heifer" when I read this about the goddess.
These
> deities, BTW, were also worshipped in the north of Egypt.  Anyway, the
color of
> the cow seems to have had some significance.
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