Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Steve:

2009/12/8 Steve Miller <smille10 AT sbcglobal.net>

>
>
> [Steve Miller] Thanks Karl! If true, this is a very valuable observation. I
> will be looking for this when I read.
> One that I think is a counter-example to this is:
> Gen 1:2 And the earth became waste and empty;
> and darkness [became] upon the face of the deep.
> And the Spirit of God [became] hovering upon the face of the waters.
>

I don’t read this verse as a counter example, because of the practice in
Biblical Hebrew of having an assumed ‘to be’ in many sentences. Here I read,
“And the earth came into being (became) lifeless and still, and darkness
[was] upon the face of the deep and God’s Spirit resting upon the face of
the waters.”


> I thought that the 2nd & 3rd clauses inherit the verb hayita from the 1st.
> Others consider the 2nd & 3rd clauses as verbless clauses that do not
> inherit anything from the 1st.
>
> I agree with the latter.

> >
> > 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.
>
> [Steve Miller] The verb krh always means "dig" or an abstraction of "dig"
> as
> in Pr 16:27 & Job 6:27 "you dig upon your friend". There is no need to
> generalize the meaning to mean "furnish". If that was the case there should
> be uses of krh to say I krh'd you some food, some clothing, etc. No, it
> always means "digged" or something that is in human experience an
> abstraction of digged, as in to dig up evil or to deeply wound.
>

Proverbs 16:27 “A useless person furnishes that which is displeasing, and
upon his lips [is] like a branding fire.” There is no neighbor in this
verse.

Job 6:27 “Even you would cause to fall (used of casting lots) for an orphan,
and you would dance (verb is כרר) upon your neighbors (as in oppressing
them)”

Where is this “digging” from?

Karl W. Randolph.