Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 03/02/2005 19:04, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> ...
>
> 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.
>
>  
Well, to put this more precisely, I am assuming that this poem within 
the context it is found in the book of Judges is considered to be the 
words of Deborah and Barak. Whether in fact the poem had a different 
source, known or unknown to the redactor of Judges, or was composed by 
someone and put on the lips of Deborah and Barak, is irrelevant. Within 
the literary context, these are the words of Deborah and Barak. And so 
one would expect Deborah and Barak to refer to themselves in the first 
person - or even that originally third person references have been 
changed to first person to fit the context.

I don't know what the ancient Hebrew convention might have been, but the 
modern (at least English) one is that each one of the authors of a joint 
composition identifies himself or herself with a first person reference 
and a name - exactly as here.
...

> 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.
>
>  
Fair enough. I am not convinced that it is malformed, but I don't have 
parallels (without 'ani) either. But of course sentences like 'ani YHWH 
dibbarti (Num 14:35) are known.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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