To: GregStffrd AT aol.com, b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
Subject: Re[2]: I AM THAT I AM
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1998 11:16 -0500 (EST)
Does 'ani 'asher 'ani really mean "I am that I am"? When we discussed
Joel 3:5 recently the same question arose: can a relative clause with
'asher (and no other marking) be the complement to an implied copula?
No-one came up with any unambiguous example from the actual text.
Normally a relative clause following a noun (or pronoun ??) is an
attribute rather than a predicate. On this basis 'ani 'asher 'ani
would mean "I, who am". Perhaps if we really want a continuous present
we need a participle (cf. Randy Buth's recent examples and Exo. 9:3):
'ani hoye 'asher 'ani. But then our attempts to translate back into
ancient Hebrew quickly become even more speculative than those
examples.