Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

> I would see $bty as a rare alternative form of y$bty.  See also Judges
>19:11, rd
> instead of yrd.
>Yitzhak Sapir

This needs a little tightening up, but I agree.

In Judges we can simply read as it is: "rad",
presumably from a root r.d.d. with a meaning similar to y.r.d.
So in Judges we have a rare dialectical word that isn't otherwise used.
But it is attested in the ktiv and MT.

We don't have the same option at Ps 23.6 because a dialectical
shav yashov 'he sat, will sit' (root sh.b.b.) would have been
1s shabboti
(or shavavti).

However, I agree that we migh have a dialect homonym
shavti 'I sat' (from root sh.w.b.)
homonym with
shavti 'I returned'
But the word  la-shuv 'to sit' otherwise doesn't exist and I have been
reluctant to add it to the "attested lexicon" of BH. I suppose it could
be listed with a question-mark. It probably best represents how
I "hear it". In fact, admitting this to myself makes it easier to accept
as a homonym.

[PS: out of curiousity I checked Qaddari, Milon to see if he might have
a note. He pointed out that in Jer 42.10 we have an infinitive "shov".
In that verse we have the complement shov teshvu instead of
yashov teshvu. So "hey!", we have two witnesses for a dialectical
shav yashuv with the meaning 'reside/live'. I will now go with the
homonym understanding, though I'm leaving the rest of this note
for completion. (PSS: checked KB3 and found ref to article in
Leshonenu 39, 1974-5: 21-36 arguing for a sh.w.b. that is like
y.sh.b., though KB3 apparently ignored implications.)]

And another option might be to assume that the vocalization preserves
a *ve(ya)shavti where the 'y' has fallen from the consonantal text.
Against this last option is that the MT could have added a qere
reading to preserve the missing syllable if that was their intention
of 'a' in shavti.
So I take it as a pre-Masoretic preservation. The 'a' vowel preserves
the verbal sense of a veqatal form, and the 'b' prepostion preserves
the sense of 'reside'.

Of course, there is no problem in the ktiv, because one may read
veshivti b- 'and my dwelling is in . . .', like the LXX read this. But
I wouldn't recommend memorizing a reconstruction. The MT is not
the infinitive.

So we don't get certainty of what was originally written for this word.
I might conjecture *weyashavti, but I never recommend that someone
memorize a conjecture and would agree that readers who memorize
the psalm memorize as the MT.

The MT exists, and as this example shows, they preserve things
that they themselves couldn't explain. It would have been easy,
both linguistically and theologically to simply vocalize like Ps 27.
4 "shivti bevet ha-shem". But they didn't take the easy road,
fortunately for us.

Randall Buth



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life