Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Steve, Jason, Moshe, et. al.:

When reading Biblical Hebrew, it is very rare that I find fragments of
sentences except where a thought is being carried forward from another
section, usually from the same verse. Then what is carried forward is almost
always a subject or object, with a new verb to add onto the previous
thought. Almost never is it the verb that is being carried forward.

Now to look at Psalm 22:17—it follows the same pattern. In Hebrew it is
split up into three sections of three words each. “They are dogs who
surround me, a congregation of those who do unpleasant things encircle me,…”
Then comes the third section, “as a lion my hands and feet.” Where’s the
verb in that section of the verse? If the verb is carried forward, then it
would be the plural “encircle” and then “as a lion” should be “as lions”.
But it’s not.

Another way of looking at it, each section of the verse (including those
verses surrounding it) consists of a distinct thought, with subject, verb
and object. Yes, they build on context for a complete picture, but they are
not sentence fragments. “As a lion” does not fit the context nor pattern.
Further, of the three words, only כאר can be a verb, the expected verb in
this section of the verse. Finally, other translations, most notably the
LXX, do indicate that it is a verb.

In conclusion, from context, grammar, and pattern, we expect to find a verb
in that section of the verse, backed up by earlier translations.

I do not agree with Jason Hare that we should split up the verses
differently. That messes up the next verse.

I think I have the same .pdf file as Steve, and the picture contained in it
can be enlarged to what appears to be a few times original before it starts
pixellating. There is no question that there כארו is written, a plural verb,
which fits the context of the rest of the verse describing a plural subject.
It also fits the pattern of the rest of the verse that each section contain
its own verb. I think the evidence from the Nahal Heber fragment shows the
correct original text that was corrupted by copyist errors by the time of
the MT. I do not think it was deliberate rewriting.

Incidentally. the photograph of the Nahal Heber fragment indicates that the
final section of verse 18 should read, “המה יביטו יראי בי”, again a reading
I anticipated from grammar, context and pattern.

Now I come to the next question: what does it mean?

I think this was one of the vocabulary that was forgotten by the time of the
LXX, hence they took it as a variation of כרה and mistranslated even that.
כרה means ‘to furnish as in to provide Pr 16:27, 26:27’ which, when what was
provided was a well, was done by means of digging. It does not mean ‘to dig’
or similar. From this, I do not think this is a prosthetic aleph. I doubt
such a thing exists.

I take this as a verb that appears only twice, the other time in Amos 8:8,
meaning ‘to deform’, an understanding taken from Akkadian medical texts
referring to diseases that deform. In which case, the aleph is an integral
part of the verb, not something slipped in.

In closing, I think the evidence is pretty strong that the Nahal Heber
fragment preserves the original text of Psalm 22:17. I am just a linguist,
not a theologian, so here is where I bow out of the argument.

Karl W. Randolph.