Dear Peter,I don't agree with your conclusion. First, let's concentrate on the lamed-he verbs, as the hiphil and hollow verbs are affected by the rule "there is no consistency in plene and defective writing" which applies to the Tanakh as well as DSS. And then I would want to limit the discussion to third person verbs, because it is well known that in the first person there is a tendency even in jussive (cohortative) forms to add an extra he, and this extra he cannot be distinguished (certainly in consonantal writing) from the final he of a non-apocopated form. Also, surely we need to look at 3rd person singular, because in the plural of lamed he verbs there is no possibility of apocopation.
Of the lamed he group in the Tanakh the WAYYIQTOLs 98 (4.7 %) og the verbs that could
have been apocopated have long forms. For the Hiphil group the number is
133 (15.5 %), and for the hollow group the number is 185 (30.7 %). In the Samaritan Pentateuch 39 (14.7 %) lamed he verbs are not apocopated. The ratio apocopated/nonapocopated forms in the different books of the Tanakh varies much. Apocopation is connected with person and verb root. For example, of 1.p.s. WAYYIQTOLs that could have been apocopated, only 66.9 % are long, of 3.p.pl.m. 75 % are long, but of 3.p.m.s. only 1.3 % are apocopated. These factors suggest that there are pragmatic reasons behind apocopation rather than semantic ones
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