Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>]

kgraham0938 AT comcast.net wrote:
> I was flipping through my old Hebrew textbook and came across something that 
> I could never figure out.  Turn to 1 Sam 3:9
>
> WFMART DABB"R YHWH KI SHOM'A` (`ABDDEKA)
> :       :                                                    :
>
> In Kittel they describe 'ABDDEKA as being "in pause" they say that it usually
>                                    :
> reads as 'ABDDKA notice the second shewa has turned into a segol and the 
>                   : :
>
> stress has moved from the last syllable to the second.
>
> Is this because of the atnah??  Or is there more to it.

It's related to the atnach, but the sequence is wrong. The point of 
pausal forms is that in the reading tradition of the synagogue that the 
Masoretes were recording, there were definable places where you would 
momentarily pause in reading. Usually, these pauses seem to correspond 
logically with what you might do in speech, although they're more 
mechanical than that. In prose, the tendency is that every verse has two 
major segments, each of those has two minor segments, etc. There's 
something of a pattern to it. So it doesn't always line up exactly with 
how we might think the actual speech pattern should go, but it's usually 
pretty good.

So, the gist of pausal forms is that you have a slowing down of speech, 
and the Masoretes were kind enough to mark this for the reader. Pausal 
forms appear with the most regularity at the end of major 
divisions--either at the end of a verse or at the atnach in the middle. 
They can appear in other places as well. The example you've cited 
happens to be one of the common effects of pause, which is to retract 
the stress in the word. This is why the accent is moved to a different 
syllable, and of course the whole point of reduced syllables is that 
they're not stressed. So you can't very well have a shva in a stressed 
syllable. The retraction therefore goes hand in hand with a change of 
voweling. In a sense, any accent mark could have been used to show where 
the stress belongs in this pausal form, but the Masoretes' system 
dictated that such things would generally appear at the end of a speech 
division, which means in most cases they will coincide with the atnach 
or silluq.

Does that make sense?

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics