Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Pere:

Both are passive participles. This is also poetry. In practice, there is no
real difference between the two. The author could very well have chosen the
different forms with essentially the same meaning to fit his meter of
poetry.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com> wrote:

>  In Ecc 9:12 we have a niph'al participle concerning fishes caught in the
> net and we have a qal passive participle concerning birds caught in the
> trap.
> Namely we have "(she)neeHazym" and "(ha)aHuzot" respectively.
>
> What might the author intend to tell the reader by using these two
> different binyanim in two facts that are quite similar, quite parallel:
> fishes are caught in a net...   birds are caught in a trap?  In both
> someone put the net and the trap in action... and its resulting issue is
> the same: the fish is caught and the bird is caught...
>
> Is there in this verse a real different nuance of meaning between the two
> binyanim?
> Had Qohelet inverted the binyanim and written "(ha)aHuzym" for fishes and
> "(she)neeHazot" for birds, would the sense of the verse have been the same
> as that of the current text we find and read in our Hebrew bibles?
>
> Is there a true difference in the meaning of the two sentences (the current
> one and the imagined one)?
> --
> Pere Porta
> (Barcelona, Catalonia, Northeastern Spain)
>
>