Biblical Hebrew Forum

[kgraham0938 AT comcast.net]

Thanks for the response, your reasoning makes much sense, It just seemed to 
make the most sense.


> 
> 
> kgraham0938 AT comcast.net wrote:
> > I am sure this has been discussed here, but what about Duet 6:4 being 
> translated as a question?
> > 
> > W: SH:MI ADONAY LO' NODA`:TI LAHEM
> > 
> > And my name YHWH was I not known to them?
> 
> I assume you mean Exod 6:3 :-)
> > 
> > Since we know that not all questions do not have an interrogative H, I 
> > think 
> this is a possible translation.
> 
> One question that I think needs to be asked is whether we can generalize 
> at all about polar (yes/no) questions that are not marked with the h- 
> prefix. Mitchell, which a century later still seems to be the most 
> comprehensive study of this construction, concludes essentially 
> (although he does not use the precise term) that the h- is only omitted 
> on questions with a mood of contraexpectation (aside from two instances 
> where it would precede the article). It should be noted that he 
> considers several instances where a question with lo but no h- has been 
> suggested and finds that they are probably not questions. If he had 
> judged otherwise in these cases, his results might have been different. 
> Still, I think caution is merited. It is too convenient to explain away 
> a difficult assertion by calling it a graphically unmarked question. If 
> we assume that a polar question can appear without h- under any 
> circumstances, we almost never have to deal with anything we don't like.
> 
> In this particular instance, I don't get any sense of contraexpectation, 
> so I'd be hesitant to call it a question. It also seems to make more 
> sense that he mentions only two names here if we read it as a contrast. 
> Otherwise, why mention two and only two, especially when the first 
> doesn't seem to be all that common? And why use two full clauses, when 
> he could have simply listed the names? We'd almost have to suspect a 
> poetic structure here to explain the cumbersome repetition, but I don't 
> know that the passage otherwise calls for a poetic reading. I don't know 
> that you can definitively rule out reading it as a question, but I don't 
> think I'd go that way myself.
> 
> Trevor Peterson
> CUA/Semitics
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