Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Why all this effort to support the LXX reading?

After all, was not LXX written because people were forgetting Biblical
Hebrew? This was not only true among the Greek speaking diaspora, but
also among the Aramaic speaking  Jews of Babylon and Judea / Galilee.
Thus it is understandable that when the translators reached Psalm
22:17, seeing a word that they did not recognize, tried to say that it
was KRH with an added aleph. But there is a root K)R that is extant
not only here, but also in Akkadian and in Amos 8:8, so why not go
with it?

By the way, KRH in Biblical Hebrew did not mean "to dig", rather "to
provide (for)" which was often used, particularly in Genesis, in the
context of providing wells for watering sheep when out in the
pastures. True, digging was the means by which wells were provided,
but the word is "provide".

Karl W. Randolph.

On 9/29/06, Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com> wrote:
> Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> >
> > The prefix ka- in this verse takes a qamats, suggesting it can't be
> > read as "As a
> > lion".  There are variants with a patach, but as it stands the standard 
> reading
> > also has its problems (though probably less than the reading k)r = dig, 
> which
> > ignore just the vowels, but also the aleph).
>
> HH: The aleph may not be such a problem. Conrad
> Gren writes:
>
> Ancient Hebrew sometimes has a fuller (plené)
> spelling than what exists in today's Hebrew text.
> This included adding alephs to assist in
> vocalization, before the vowel pointing system.
>
> Yours,
> Harold Holmyard