Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Yitzhak,

you're logic is completely self contradictory. If you are to insist that the
second bath is talking about Anah then by the same token you would have to
insist that Zibeon was Esau's wife. Your understanding contradicts the wider
context of 10 verses later. You seem to be grasping at straws and it's not
doing you any favours. It's making you look completely incompetent and
lacking in a basic understanding of Hebrew.

The LXX is evidently a bad translation here. The clause continues to supply
additional information about Oholibamah. She is the focus throughout the
clause. To change the focus from Oholibamah to Anah back to Oholibamah
breaks the natural semantic logic of the phrase. The Vulgate corrects the
LXX mistake and goes back to the original Hebrew. I have no idea why the LXX
contains such an elementary mistake. Presumably the translators Hebrew was
good enough. I would suggest the best bet is that they were either working
with a corrupt text with BN in place of BT or being in a hurry and knowing
Anah to be a bloke didn't read the text carefully and translated as uios.

James Christian

On 18 May 2010 04:00, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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