Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stewart Felker <stewart.felker AT gmail.com>]

Here is the highest quality image of the fragment I could find:

http://i.imgur.com/wmds5kw.jpg

Directly preceding the word I've circled in orange is the infamous כארי or כארו. The DJD edition actually opts for the latter here, due to the elongation of the final letter (although it's been pointed out that this isn't ironclad). Whatever the case may be for this letter though, less attention has been paid to the final letter of the circled word. In MT this is simply ידי - but here the editors tentatively restore ידיה.

Regardless of however we might interpret that reading, upon closer inspection there are several difficulties with the final letter. There seem to be _two_ strokes comprising the left hand side of this letter - one curved somewhat inward, and one seemingly curved the opposite direction (which itself appears to have another slight stroke coming off the bottom of it, though this may just be a smudge). Further, there is a dot above and slightly to the left of this letter; and although it's obvious that there are several accidental ink artifacts in the fragment, this dot looks conspicuous to me.

Finally, is the larger mark a full space after this dot simply one of these accidental artifacts? It somewhat resembles ג to me, although the next word should be ורגלי (but the next clearest word that can be discerned is עצמ]ותי], in the line below).

Stewart Felker,

University of Memphis