Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 7/13/06, James Christian Read wrote:

> Yitzhak wrote:
> But in light of the
> similarity in form and structure between these two
> parallelisms
> END QUOTE
>
> JCR: While we are considering parallels it seems that
> there is a most important parallel that we are not really
> focusing on but should be as it is the most relevant.
>
>  וחשך על פני תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים
>
> In this parallel we see the form al p:ney (on the face
> of) used twice. It is clear from this context that
> 'Tehom', be it a real proper noun or merely a grammatical
> nuance, is paralleled with 'the two waters' (hamayim).

Two problems:
1) hamayim does not mean "the two waters."  The -ayim
ending is due not to the dual being used, but to the
last root letter being -y, the root being a two letter "my".
In function, the word acts as a sort of "aggregate plural"
in that it is a plural ("mayim rabbim") and yet cannot
take a number because it is already aggregate.  You don't
see "mayim )exad" or "(&rim mayim".  So there also can't
be "two" mayim.  In fact, in the above definition, you are
using an English nuance (waters = body of water) which
is probably not valid in Hebrew.

2) There is no reason to believe there is a parallelism.
Just the use of the two words "(l pny" does not mean that
the two objects are the same.  We might have been
justified in arguing this given poetry, but this is prose.
Furthermore, even in poetry, a parallelism doesn't always
mean "equal."  It can mean that the two paralleled items
are similar or the other way around, that they are
opposites (such as $amayim vs )arec).  Also, a parallelism
generally requires us to look for equivalence on all items
of the parallelism.  Thus, in this case we should ask if
"ruax )elohim" = "xo$ek".

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com