Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Yitzhak:

To risk driving a subject into the ground, I want to make a couple of 
comments:

There are naturally forming vegetative forms of pitch, among them the pitch 
that oozes from conifer trees. That pitch usually ranges from clear to a pale 
yellow to a hint of tan. Pitch that is derived from burning wood has a lot of 
carbon in it, hence it is black. Which form of pitch was used in ancient 
Israel? How about what was available to Moses' mother in Egypt?

The phrase $$ZPTNY H$M$ does not obviously mean "the sun tanned me". From 
Hebrew grammar (not Ugaritic, nor Akkadian, those were cognate, foreign 
languages with different vocabularies and grammars than Hebrew) we have a $- 
prefix, which functioned like a poetic contraction of )$R with the following 
word, followed by a third person feminine singular verb with a first person 
singular personal pronoun suffix from the verb $ZP. In looking at a 
concordance, I noticed that sometimes $M$ was given a masculine, sometimes a 
feminine, verb, making it the subject of this verb.

What is the meaning of $ZP? From its two uses in Job 20:9 and 28:7 it appears 
to have the meaning "to see for a short time" as in a glance or glimpse. I 
don't see what the problem is here in taking this as a playful, poetic way in 
saying "the sun glanced at me" as saying that the person had been outdoors. 
Such poetic use of language is not out of place in other languages and 
cultures, so why is it not allowed in ancient, Biblical Hebrew?

(Years ago, a story made the rounds about how a Swede, visiting Trondheim, 
Norway, asked a local cabbie to "Ta mig til en rolig plass" which in Swedish 
(slang?) meant "Take me to where there's hot night life." However, the 
Norwegian cabbie heard "Ta meg til en rolig plass" meaning "take me to a 
quiet place" and so drove him to a cemetary. If languages so close that 
people speaking one can understand 90+% of the other yet can have such 
misunderstandings, how can we insist that languages so far apart that one 
speaking one could not understand the other should serve as models for each 
other?)

I noticed that you gave two other examples of possible shafel verbs below; 
both are Aramaic, not Hebrew. making them irrelevant to the discussion.

In closing, my criticism was not of the ancient Hebrews as being "dull", 
rather it is of modern scholars who often assume that the ancients were dull 
pedants like themselves. I claim that it is the moderns who lack creativity 
and playfulness with language so much so that they don't recognize when 
others play with language, not the ancients.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>0
> 
> Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> > You have the shafel form based on speculation on one verb, and 
> > that one example is disputed, even as early as Ibn Ezra. To have
> > a shafel as an alternate for hiphil, you need more than one 
> > disputed example, which you don't have.
> 
> I don't speculate one verb.  I suggest that it was in a nearby
> foreign language such as Amorite or Akkadian, and we know that
> Ugaritic and Akkadian both had Shafel forms.  I suggest that
> perhaps a few words - a handful or so - were borrowed in this form.
> And there are a lot more verbs that are suggested for it.  Rabin
> suggests 46 different four letter roots which may be possible
> Shafels (and further others), in various Aramaic and Hebrew
> languages including: $YZB (from Akkadian u$ezib = $(ZB =
> rescued), $YCY (from Akkadian u$es.i).  I suggest you look up
> the above articles and see all the suggested forms.
> 
> > I get the impression that modern scholars think that the ancient 
> > Hebrews were rather dull people without any originality nor 
> > ability
> > to use picturesque, indirect speech. Since I believe that the 
> > ancients were just as capable of playing with language as any of 
> > their modern descendents, I have no problem with "I am darkened 
> > (because) which the sun glimpsed me" as a picturesque way of 
> > saying that "I've been out in the sun and I am tanned."
> 
> There is no need to insinuate that exact and sharp
> parallelisms, as opposed to "more picturesque" metaphors implies
> that the ancients were dull.  Generally, parallelisms allow you
> to join several metaphors in one statement as not only the
> statements are paralleled, but also specific grammatical entities
> within those statements, and each parallel is a metaphor.
> Generally, the metaphor between the statements is the main
> one, so that the parallelism is comparable to a regular
> (non-parallelism) metaphor.  But sometimes, I find that there
> are parallelisms with several metaphors each showing extreme
> insight, ingenuity, and wit.  This would not be possible in a
> regular metaphor without the literary device of parallelism.  As
> such, I many times feel that modern poetic constructs that
> usually rely on metaphors but not parallelisms are much less
> richer than the biblical poetry with its "dull" parallelisms.
> 
> I think even Ibn Ezra has problems with "The sun saw me"
> because he uses several verbs in series to suggest "The sun
> saw me and ... and revealed me."  Perhaps because "reveal",
> unlike "see", is an action that affects the object, like tanning.
> 
> Yitzhak Sapir
-- 
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