Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:31 AM, James Christian wrote:
> May I also note that your failure to spot this kind of undermines your
> position that reading unpointed text won't lead to better instincts. Your
> reliance on cantilation marks certainly didn't seem to help you work this
> one out.
> James Christian

James, I don't need to rely on cantillation marks.  But I wondered if there 
was
some effort at disambiguation there.  Yes, in this case there can only
be a strict
reading of this verse.  BT may mean "granddaughter" but its antecedent
in such a chain can only be the last person mentioned.  The Septuagint reads
BN in this place in Gen 36:2 and 36:14, and also reads (ONAN in 36:24,
so evidently readers at the time of the Septuagint also had an issue with
this second BT.  The Septuagint apparently shows us traditions that identified
(NH of 36:2 and 36:14 as a different person from 36:24 (ONAN on the one
hand, conflated with traditions that fixed the reading of 36:2 and 36:14 to
read BN.  (NH has a qamats-he ending so it does stand as a feminine
sounding name.  In any case, at the end, such a common expression for
genealogy cannot stand as ambiguous.  So many times does the Bible
use it for identification of people, and this reasonably reflects the 
situation
in the community as well, where the heritage was used in place of surnames,
that it is unreasonable to read the second BT as referring to Oholibamah.
Furthermore, the author had an easy way to tell us that Oholibamah was
Ziv(on's granddaughter --he could have used BN!  Why then did he use
BT here but in other genealogies of this form used BN?  Why does the
Septuagint read BN not BT?  The only way this could be interpreted in
Hebrew is that (ANAH, according to verses 2 and 14, was a girl.  Yes, it
is inconsistent with 36:24.  That we see that there were various attempts
(as in the Septuagint) to deal with the issue, only reinforces that this was
a valid issue for the native Hebrew speakers during Second Temple period
times.  From a textual critical perspective, all else being equal, we would
choose the reading BT because it is the more difficult reading -- lectio
difficilior.  One possible explanation would be that the two verses are from
different genealogies in different sources.

Regarding )$T, that would not necessarily have as antecedent Ziv(on.  
Primarily,
unlike the case of BT, there is no simple way for the author to disambiguate
Ziv(on as the wife from Oholibamah as the wife.  Furthermore, by the time we
read about Ziv(on we already know that it is Oholibamah that is the wife from
earlier verses.  In contrast, when we read the series of BT in
36:2/14, this is not
yet known to us.  This is why a native reader would have understood that it is
Oholibamah that is the wife, but that in 36:2, and 14, (anah is a daughter.

So yes, context is helpful, but not very much here.  Here context would lead 
you
to recognize an inconsistency, but Hebrew usage would prevent you from forcing
the interpretation BT = reference to Oholibamah.

Yitzhak Sapir