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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Genesis 2:15 and 2:17 is garden feminine?

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  • From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Genesis 2:15 and 2:17 is garden feminine?
  • Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2006 06:49:48 +0000

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



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