Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jason Hare" <jaihare AT gmail.com>]

The new image you sent has a grammatical mistake from the outset. It's
a construct chain, so the construct forms do not take articles, as
with the word התולדות in your image. It seems that the author did a
poor job translating Matthew into Hebrew, and then to add to his
confusion he attempted to adopt Tiberian markings but not to use them
in any standard way. Apparently, he took three disjunctive accents to
indicate pause and disregarded the phrase accents leading into them.

With the information that only these three accents are mentioned (and
I did see them in the larger image you posted), I am left to think
that he simply used the silluq/meteg sign as a secondary stress marker
on all words that did not receive one of his (randomly) chosen
disjunctive accents. The system employed here is completely for stress
marking, devoid of any reference to cantillation or tone.

Perhaps he even used the pausal marks in different ways, marking
verse-final with sof pasuq, verse medial with etnach and tertiary
pause with zaqef qaton. I want to spend a bit more time looking over
the image that you sent before of two pages, but it doesn't seem like
a very complete system to me, and I think you should simply choose the
meteg for your encoding.

The presence of two metegs on the one word in התולדות is probably to
look Biblical, where there are sometimes two accents on long words
(for example ואהבת in Deuteronomy 6:5 with both munach and zaqef
qaton). It indicates that the author things that there should be a
small stress on the -TO- syllable: ha-TO-le-DOT. Or, it could simply
indicate the vocal sheva in the following syllable (using it as the
standard meteg, holding the long vowel away from the following
syllable).

It could be a number of things, but I think you should interpret all
of these marks (even the ones that are a little curved and look more
like either tipcha or mercha) as meteg/silluq.

Best regards,
Jason Hare
Rehovot, Israel

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Brak <Brak AT neo.rr.com> wrote:
> I'm currently wondering if this glyph in the text is indeed a NEW glyph,
> or just a different style for a current glyph.
>
> Here's another example, which has a word with two glyphs, a meteg  and
> the mystery mark.
> http://home.roadrunner.com/~pgj_k/example_4.jpg
>
> What's interesting is that the preface doesn't mention the use of the
> meteg.
>
> B"H
> John Steven