Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Thanks all for answering.
This meaning, that it is a defective spelling for HWDW "his majesty", was my
first choice. The reason I asked was for the following reasons:

1) by the time of Jeremiah (assuming that the Documentary Hypothesis is
false), Hebrew writers consistently wrote the male, third person singular
suffix with a waw, not a heh. Heh in Hebrew is found only in early writings,
i.e. Genesis.

2) the context seems to indicate that this is a person, not something like
"his majesty"

3) the LXX does not translate it, which I would expect it to translate were
it understood to be as common a word as HWD, albeit defectively spelled.

Apparently there are no clues in either DSS or cognate languages.

Thanks again all for responding.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:04 AM, Yaakov Stein <yaakov_s AT rad.com> wrote:

>
> > Does anyone have any clue about the meaning of HDH, the last word of the
> verse?
>
> Karl
>
> I know you don't look at the vocalized version,
> but it is pointed as if it were HODO.
>
> It means his HOD, i.e. his glory (gloriness?) as in Ps 21:6
> or in HOD MLKUT (appears in several places).
> In modern Hebrew we use KBODO in this way.
>
> HOD here is a noun, rather than the more usual adjective.
>
>
> Y(J)S