Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Mike Gockley <mike.gockley AT gmail.com>]

Dave brings up a good point here concerning the limitations of B-Hebrew with
respect to the definite nature of the construct element in a construct
chain. Context alone can determine whether the construct is meant to be
definite or not. A similar dilemma is also seen in translating the phrase
MLAK YHWH. Most translations go with the definite option which may point
toward the idea of a proper name, however this could be reading a certain
idea into the text that cannot be determined based on the syntax alone. It
is merely an unfortunate limitation of the language.

Mike Gockley
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 2:22 PM, <dwashbur AT nyx.net> wrote:

> Karl,
> While I tend to agree with you about Genesis, wouldn't most of the examples
> you're talking
> about be construct forms?  Those can't take the article.  It seems to me
> that might skew the
> results of your search somewhat.
>
> On 30 Sep 2009 at 8:16, K Randolph wrote:
>
> > To answer this question, I just did a quick electronic search for
> >  MLK
> > and found many examples where it is used without a definite article
> > yet as a
> > title, not a name. A common contextual clue is "king of ..."
> > with the name of
> > the place over which he is the king. Often it is preceded by the
> > king´s
> > name, followed by the title "king of" then the name of the
> > place. We have
> > the example of Exodus 1:8 and Deuteronomy 17:14-15 where the
> > definite
> > article does not fit the context. From this example, we see that a
> > title
> > does not change to a name in the absence of a definite article in
> > Biblical
> > Hebrew.
>
> Dave Washburn
>
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
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