Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

>
> Subject:
> Re: [b-hebrew] Definite Article 7:14
> From:
> Harold Holmyard <hholmyard3 AT earthlink.net>
> Date:
> Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:37:28 -0500
> To:
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
>
> To:
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
>
>
> Dear Joseph,
>> HH: "My argument was not that the generic use of the article was
>> exactly the  same as the usage of it in Gen 14:13, but they are
>> similar. The one  could lead to the other. I wrote to Joseph:
>>
>> See the word "famine" in  Isa 29:8. See how it is used with "silver"
>> in Gen 13:2, or with "crimson" in  Isa 1:18, or with "blindness" in
>> Gen 19:11. In all these English would use  "a/an" or nothing, not "the."
>>
>> Or look at these cases below, all of which  take the definite article
>> in Hebrew, but an indefinite article in  English:
>>
>> like the heart of a lion (2 Sam 17:10)
>>
>> as a dog laps  (Judges 7:5)
>>
>> as one hunts a partridge (1 Sam 26:20)
>>
>> as one rends a  kid (Judges 14:6)
>>
>> If Hebrew could consider all these cases, which are  clearly
>> indefinite in English, as worthy of a definite article in a generic
>> sense,"
>>
>>
>> JW:
>> None of the above are clearly indefinite in English. I've seen
>> English  translations with "the" for all but Judges 14:6. More
>> importantly, none even sound awkward with "the".
>
> HH: Sorry, but they do sound somewhat awkward to me because English does
> not usually use the generic definite article this way, preferring an
> indefinite article.
>

I'm the same as Joseph, though: all apart from the last one sounds fine.


[snip]

>
> HH: David Kummerow shared with some of us an article written by a man
> named Ehrensvärd. It claimed to undermine the category of the definite
> article that you don't like. I went through only about a dozen of his
> examples. He was trying to undermine the force of 67 examples.  Some
> examples seemed implausible for the definite meaning that he tried to
> attribute to them. The strongest case of implausibility for me was with
> his example 11. This was the author's argument:
>
> (11) He found him sitting under the oak tree [H)LH] (1 Kgs 13,14)
> A known oak tree.
>
> HH: In example 11, a prophet of God traveled from Judah to Bethel and
> was heading back to Judah, The sons of a man show their father the road
> that the man of God was taking back to Judah. The father followed the
> prophet and found him sitting under "the oak tree." There was evidently
> more than one road the man of God could have taken; otherwise the sons
> would not have had to show their father the road. If the readers don't
> even know the precise road, how can they know the well-known oak tree on
> it?
>
> David thought it was too presumptuous of me to draw such a conclusion on
> the basis of my limited knowledge of the biblical situation, but the
> case is so weak in example 11 that it loses credibility, and there are
> several a bit like that. The reason I bring this author up is that he is
> trying to shoot holes in an established grammatical category found in
> numerous Hebrew grammars. It is related to several other categories of
> usage of the Hebrew article that are similar but different from English
> usage. These are grammarians from different centuries. It is not just
> these grammarians, for the translators of the King James Version drew
> similar conclusions back in the 1600's. And translators across a wide
> spectrum of beliefs  confirm the grammarians' judgment by likewise
> translating with the indefinite article where the Hebrew has the
> definite article.
>

OK. I accept that 1Kgs 13:14 is most probably as you outline. However, 
this is an exception to the overwhelming majority. Most of the other 
examples can be taken otherwise. For me, the number is simply too low to 
establish an indefinite category for the definite pronoun. I accept that 
this may not be accepted. But I suggest that if this is maintained, then 
perhaps another name other than "definite article" should be used.

I've given thought a bit more to the generic use of the definite article 
and I'm not entirely sure that the indefinite use you argue for could 
have sprung from it as you suggested earlier. In a generic use, the 
definite article does not refer to either a specific or known 
individual, but to a category (member?). However, the indefinite 
examples are all claimed to refer to specific unknown individuals. This 
is quite different. The arguments of my previous post remain 
substantively untreated. It remains to be demonstrated for me if the BH 
"definite article" has in fact undergone semantic bleaching to the point 
that it is rather a "marker of specificity" rather than a "marker of 
definiteness". Some of these examples may perhaps be a move in this 
direction. However, again, most need not be taken as indefinite -- 
despite what the grammars assert and what some translations have done.

Much the same point is made by Holmstedt (2006: 21-22) regarding some 
aberrant uses of ’ăšer:

"What, then, do we do with these apparently aberrant examples? Since 
they represent less than than one-fifth of one percent of the 5,500 
’ăšer clauses in the Hebrew Bible, not including the 299 included 
clauses from Ben Sira and Qumran, I suggest that we hesitate in 
recognising them as part of the grammar of ancient Hebrew. It is 
possible that they are grammatical, particularly if we subscribe to 
Sapir's maxim that 'all grammars leak,' which suggests that there is 
room at the edges of a language's grammar for strange, but grammatical, 
constructions. However, given the extreme statistical rarity of examples 
in which ’ăšer serves a non-nominalising role, I strongly prefer to 
exclude altogether these examples from the grammar of Hebrew; while they 
might have been interpretable (an open question for which we shall never 
have an answer since we lack native speaker input), they are nonetheless 
grammatically unacceptable.

"This should not be a troublesome conclusion, since if we believe 
ancient Hebrew to be a real language, then we should expect to face 
marginally acceptable and even outright ungrammatical examples in such a 
large and varied corpus as the Hebrew Bible....We should neither be 
surprised to find errors, nor should we attempt to include them in our 
grammars as anything other than a footnote."

My feeling is that, mutatis mutandis, this is much the case with the 
so-called indefinite use of the BH definite article.


Holmstedt, Robert D. 2006. “The Story of Ancient Hebrew ’ăšer.” Ancient 
Near Eastern Studies 43: 7-26.

Regards,
David Kummerow.