Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Pere:

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, friends.
> We find here and there in the biblical text some words that appear in two
> versions: without H and with H.


> 1 Nouns:
> In Gn 1:3 we have )WR, light; in Est 8:16 we have )WRFH, light.
>
> 2. Verbs:
> In 2Sa 2:22 we have SWR, turn aside! while in Rt 4:1 we have SWRFH, same
> meaning.
>
> They appear as being quite and mere synonyms.
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1. Are they really synonyms? Does the suffix H introduce some shade into
> the
> meaning of the word that has H compared with the word that lacks H?
>

Yes.

>
> 2. Do you know of other similar pairs, either nouns or verbs?
>

I found roughly 200 such pairs among nouns.

>
> 3. Would there be a good reason for these variants? I mean: maybe some
> evolution of the language (older writings like Genesis versus newer
> writings
> like Esther or 2Samuel versus Ruth) would explain this difference?
>

No, I found no such correlation.

>
>
> What do you think about this?
>

A few years ago I asked the same question, and Peter Kirk answered that if
anyone were to give an answer to this question, that that would be a PhD
dissertation. If you look in the archives, you can find the discussions that
ensued at that time.

A lot more research is needed to verify and/or expand on initial
impressions. Some of the things I found in the initial survey are as
follows:

Without a final heh — with a final heh
Concrete (object) — abstraction
Specific (individual) — generality (group)
Adjective — abstract noun

Some pairs don’t follow a pattern.

This is with over half the pairs I found not analyzed yet.

This is not counting those pairs that signify male/female gender.

>
>
> --
> Pere Porta
> (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)
>

Karl W. Randolph.