Biblical Hebrew Forum

[MarjorieAlley AT cs.com]

In a message dated 7/12/2006 7:19:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time, peter AT qaya.org 
writes:

Using Paratext (a tool available only to Bible translators), I was able 
to find the following, which if I have got it correct is an exhaustive 
list of 65 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible of prefix L- with a word with 
the pattern ?A?A?, where A represents qamats. I have excluded cases 
where the final letter is he or yod as this is a much more common 
pattern. I have not checked that all of the words are nouns. Many of 
them are proper names e.g. Laban, Tamar, Dathan, Balak, Barak, Nabal, 
Nathan, Haman.

GEN 2:24; 29:13,16; 30:42; 31:22,31,36; 38:11,13; EXO 4:3; 7:15; 8:6,19; 
LEV 13:16,17; NUM 11:18; 16:12; 22:22,32; 23:3,9; DEU 11:6; 28:13,37,44; 
JOS 7:13; JDG 4:6; 1SA 10:12; 25:34; 29:4; 2SA 19:23; 1KI 1:32; 9:7; 2CH 
7:20; 21:3; 32:27; EZR 8:16; EST 3:2,4,10,11; 5:12; 6:10; JOB 5:22; PSA 
4:9; 40:11; 49:5; 69:12; 141:4; PRO 17:7; SNG 7:8; ISA 32:5; JER 21:9; 
24:9; 27:20; 38:2; 39:18; 45:5; 49:32; 50:10; EZK 7:21; 11:11; 21:20; 
MIC 7:14; HAB 1:9


Peter and Joel --- Many thanks to you both! 

Joel, I was very impressed with your creativity. Using your memory of 
qamets-qamets nouns and then scanning the concordance for lamed prefixes was 
a pretty 
nifty trick!  (And since I don't own Paratext but I do have a copy of 
Even-Shoshan, I will keep your method in mind. Actually, it reminds me of 
some of the 
Masoretic lists. When I first started looking through the lists a few years 
ago, I could hardly believe the variety of lists which the rabbis compiled 
--- 
and they were all done without software OR concordances!)

And Peter, thank you very much for using your software to generate an 
exhaustive list! I will be going through the examples one by one later today. 
 (You 
say Paratext is available only to Bible translators. It's not a commercial 
product?)

I want to add that Karl's analysis of the unvowelled consonantal text 
undoubtedly addresses a more significant issue. But one of the acquaintances 
I 
mentioned in my first post is Orthodox, and I suspect he accepts the vowels 
as 
inspired and unchangeable.  For purposes of my discussion with him, it is 
more to 
the point to know that if  %+N were an infinitive construct in this verse, it 
could not be pointed with qamets-qamets.

Regards,
Marjorie Alley