Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vadim Cherny <him AT vadimcherny.org>]

It's about syllabification. Dagesh (a stop) was introduced to prevent 
consonantal jamming in clusters, sort of:

natan voker - nata nvoker - nata 'voker

rather,

natan .voker - natan boker

Now, in your example, there is no danger of concatenation and subsequent 
jamming:

veavar-ti ve-eretz

As a rule, word-initial dagesh doesn't appear when the previous word 
ends with -CCV.

Vadim Cherny

David H wrote:
> I have noticed some strange occurences of words that do not use a Dagesh 
> where it would expect one; specifically, the preposition 'be' [in] and 'kol' 
> [all],  which were both written as 've' and 'chol' [i.e no dagesh].
>  
> This came up in Exodus 12:12 ;
>  
> ' Ve'avarti VE'eretz mitzrayim ba'lailah hazeh, ve-hikeiti CHOL-bechor....'
>  
> I was wondering if anybody could explain why the usual dagesh-ed form is not used!
>  
> Thanks a lot!
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