Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I've thought about it some more and it seems to me that the form with qamats
is to be explained as an archaic form displaced by analogy.  While analogy is
a normal linguistic process which displaces older forms, the older forms
sometime survive in restricted contexts.  One would still have to figure out
the exact analogy, however.

Yitzhak Sapir