Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 11/12/06, Yigal Levin wrote:
> Yes Kenneth, the noun "gan" in verse 15 is feminine, so theoretically the
> object of "mot tamut" at the end of verse 17 COULD be the garden. However,
> from a contextual point of view this is a stretch: the object of verse 16 is
> the man, and verse 17 is a direct extention of verse 16. If the author had
> intended that the garden would die, he would have said so specifically.
> Besides, where in scripture is a garden (or any plant) ever  refered to as
> "dying"?

Also, I think the idea of the object of verse 16 could be extended: Although
this isn't poetry exactly, the  "mot tɔmut" is in some kind of parallelism 
with
the ")ɔkol tokel" of the previous verse.  And because verse 17 also reads
")akɔlkɔ" with a qamats in the final vowel, it is clear that the "tokel" of 
the
previous verse is meant in the second person masculine.  As a result of the
parallelism, it is likely that so too is the parallel verb "tɔmut".
In other words,
a parallelism argument could be used here besides the immediate contextual
one, and it yields similar results (very likely the same, and anything else is
perhaps possible but a stretch).

Yitzhak Sapir