Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 03/02/2005 18:23, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> 
> >... Also,
> >reading, "until I, Deborah, arose," is simply wrong.  There is no 
> >way that you can equate Deborah with "I" when "I" is not a 
> >separate word but implied in the verb.
> >
> Thank you for all of this. I would like to pick up on just this one 
> point.
> 
> Is this in fact a case of a noun being used as the subject of a 1st
> person singular verb? Is this usage otherwise attested in Hebrew? 
> It is in some other languages. Are you accepting this parsing of 
> the verb, or does your "simply wrong" apply to this parsing?
> 
> If this is a case of a noun being used as the subject of a 
> 1st person singular verb, then what can the meaning be other 
> than a construction like "I, Deborah"? And of course this fits the 
> context because Deborah is the speaker.

It fits the context if you assume that Deborah was the speaker, but
the contextual information that tells you Deborah was the speaker
is secondary since the song is a separate unit and "And Deborah
and Barak sang" is part of the book of Judges which contains it.
Nowhere in the song does it say "I Deborah..." in any place clear.
For all we know, it could be Barak speaking here.

As for the "clearly wrong", I was commenting on the appositive
usage, "I, Deborah,."  I am not a linguist, but it seems to me to
be a mistranslation.  In Modern Hebrew, it sounds malformed, and
it doesn't seem to me that this could ever be possible in Biblical
Hebrew.  If it would have said, "Ad shaqqamti Ani Deborah"  or
"Ad Ani Deborah Shaqqamti"  it would have been ok.  The reading
therefore, suggests either: Deborah is the object of the verb, in
which case a causative would be proper here, or Shaqqamti is
second person (archaic form of Shaqqamt) and refers to Deborah
having arisen ("until you arose, O Deborah, until you arose, O
Mother in Israel") The second, as I have mentioned several times, is 
the most common reading, and the one Soggin later adopts.  I 
would still like to think it is causative, and it is important for me that 
a reputed scholar read it so for 15 years, although I recognize
the difficulties.

So in short, my "simply wrong" applies to this parsing, but I don't
really know if it does not exist in Biblical Hebrew, since I have no
tools to search for it.  It just seems very malformed and even more
problematic than shaqqamti as Shafel.

Yitzhak Sapir