Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/5/07, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 05/01/2007 13:11, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> > ...
> > Perhaps more appropriate examples would be the roots dwh and the word
> > davay (dwy) or the root lwh and the word levi (lwy) (perhaps).
> >
> >
> Perhaps, but aren't you doing what I did, making conjectural links
> between nouns and verbal roots? While the derivation of "Levi" from LWH
> "join" is given in Genesis 29:34, this may be a folk etymology and did
> not convince BDB. There is verb DWH, found only once in biblical Hebrew,
> may be derived from the noun.

That is why I added "perhaps".  But my claim is not that these are definite
links.  My claim is that these at least constitute some kind of evidence for
what a related noun could have looked like. The word cɔv that you define
as "command" has nothing to back it up (the spelling with a patax is only
produced by the example in Isaiah which you apparently do not connect
as Karl does).  That is, the point currently being argued is whether cɔv
could be derived from the verb cwh.  We find that there is very little
evidence for that direction.  It appears that in all nouns under discussion
all root letters would have representation, either as consonants or vowels.
I suppose cɔv could have been derived from a verb *cww, with a qatal noun
form (cawaw > cɔw > cɔv, with comparison to the plural of yawm,
yawamim > yɔmim).   However, it would appear that there is no reason to
assume such a root.  The cognates noted in HALOT appear to indicate an
interchange of root letters (wcy in Arabic, wd. in Egyptian) but also that -y
was the final root letter.  Elephantine Aramaic apparently has "bcwt" ("by
order"), which would also indicate a verb, and suggests a final -h for the
word in Hebrew.  The evidence turns up very weak that from such a verb
cwh/cwy, someone in Biblical times would have derived the word cw.

And this weak evidence is compounded by the fact that there already is
a word (mcwh), that this word is not translated in the Septuagint as
"command" (but as you noted appears to be a reading of "$w)"), that later
Hebrew would derive a noun "cw)h" (giving an aleph as a place-holder for
the final root letter), and that cw is missing from Rabbinic Hebrew.  You
seem to have the evidence stacked up against you.  I am not saying it
isn't somehow possible.  It just appears extremely unlikely.

In contrast, I would suggest correcting Hosea 5:11 cw with the
Septuagint's reading "$w)" to read "cw)", and derive it from a cognate of
Arabic Dw) "light", which does make some sense in that passage, given
the following allusion to moths, which seems somewhat out of place
otherwise.

If you don't like that, I think it's best to just assume that it is a word of
unknown meaning, than to assume that it is "command".

Yitzhak Sapir