Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

This comes largely via Randall Buth to correct some perceived mistakes in a 
recent thread that has been closed. The thread was closed due to the exchange 
becoming personal, but I've allowed this post because it deals strictly with 
the language issues. This will be the only post in this thread.

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שדי אשתי קראים אתי ללון הלילה
appears to be good BH.

Nevertheless, this was alleged to be poor BH. Yet there were some mistakes 
made in doing so.

1. The first proposed corrective word קראונני incorrectly joins a 'long 
energic suffix' to a suffix conjugation. However, long energic suffixes 
belong to the prefix-conjugation stems.

2. Changing the form qore'im to qare'u is also a mistake, not because qare'u 
is wrong, but because qore'im is not wrong. Yet it was suggested that it was 
wrong. It is simply not true that participles always refer
to 'doers' and never to 'actions' as verbs.

3. Word order: the correct word order for choice of Hebrew words is לשכב 
הלילה li-shkab ha-layla.

4. The verb la-lun: It was proposed that the subject of ילין yalin (SS 1:13) 
was a bag of myrrh. But the verb la-lun only has human subjects in the Hebrew 
Bible, supporting "my beloved" as the intended subject of SS 1:13.

5. Apparent inconsistency: Karl "agreed" with Uri (who proposed לי as 
preferrable to אותי), but then Karl went on to use an accusative himself with 
the verb קרא. The accusative is not a mistake, of course, but 'agreeing that 
the accusative was wrong' is evidently erroneous.

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GEORGE ATHAS
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
www.moore.edu.au