Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Mike:

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mike Burke <michaelgburk AT yahoo.com> wrote:

Would an electronic search of Hamlet turn up every possible phrase in which every word Shakespeare used in Hamlet could properly be used in Elizabethan English (or which he himself used in his collected works)?

In the case of Shakespeare, we have a multitude of documents from him and his time period that have come down to us. It’s from that multitude of documents that we have actual examples of how the language was used.

For Biblical Hebrew, very few have survived, and those that have are brief. That makes that 99.9% of all the examples we have of Biblical Hebrew come from one source, namely Tanakh itself.

You keep asking me for context, so I gave you a hypothetical one.

Is the following sentence entirely unintelligible?

מבדיל בעדי גויים

This is not a sentence. There’s no verb, and what’s the subject? As far as I can tell, this is nonsense.

Can anyone tell me what בעדי would in this hypothetical context?

Thank you.

Michael Gerard Burke

I noticed your comment that you don’t have resources, well neither did I. All I had was one year of formal training, then two dictionaries, one of which was the Analytical Hebrew and Chaldea Lexicon by Davidson, http://www.amazon.com/Analytical-Hebrew-Chaldee-Lexicon/dp/0913573035/ref=sr_1_6_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369081212&sr=1-6&keywords=analytical+lexicon and I later got a concordance http://www.amazon.com/Konkordanz-Hebraischen-Testament-Concordance-Society/dp/1598565222/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk . Then all I did was read, read and read Tanakh through several times. Even now I continue that practice.

Today computers make that study much easier. Texts can be downloaded for free from http://www.crosswire.org along with some dictionaries. I find the electronic texts and dictionaries much easier and more powerful to use than the paper documents with which I started.

Karl W. Randolph.