Biblical Hebrew Forum

[colin AT s-m-i-t-h.com]

On Wednesday 02 February 2005 13:37, Bill Rea wrote:
> Yitzhak wrote:-
>
> >Finally, we should mention Hishtah.awwah, which in Ugaritic is
> >a Shafel form, so there the connection with Shafel is much
> >clearer  (And yet, the presence of the Hi- prefix suggests it is
> >used as a quadratic root $-h.-w-w in Hitapel form, I guess).
>
> With all the usual caveats about finding meaning of real words from
> theoretical roots, if Hishtah.awwah was indeed a Hitapel form from
> the root $-h.-w-w what would it mean?

I don't know who said the Ugaritic was a Shafel, but it's my understanding
that Ugaritic showed us that the Hebrew form is a previously-unknown H-$-T
form from a root XWH.  See Holladay/K-B, which calls this form an "Eshtafal."

Dave Washburn


Dave is quite correct. Ugaritic supplies us with abundant evidence that
the form H$tXWH is an H-$-T stem used with the root XWH. The $ is a
frequent causative element in Semitic languages (along with Aleph in the
case of Aramaic) as is /S/ in Egyptian.
Is is curious to note the number of instances in which $ appears in
Akkadian for the same purpose that Hey is used in Hebrew, e.g. the
Akkadian postposition -$ (as in Enuma eli$ ... $apli$) parallel to Hebrew
postpositive -H, both used as the English postpositive -ward (toward,
forward, leeward, etc.)

Colin Smith