To Ed Cook, see comments following:
> Greg > With regard to your reading of 4Q282i: It seems to me that your > understanding of this fragment hinges on reading BTWLTW as a form of the > root TLH. Two things militate against this: (1) TLH is not attested, as > far as I know, in the Piel or in the Pual forms; (2) even if Pual, you > would have the unusual situation of a short vowel indicated by a mater > while the long vowel of the infinitive ending is written defectively.This > is possible, but unlikely. > > If you want to salvage this reading, why not propose that the first waw was > inserted wrongly? It is a supralinear addition, and the scribe may have > wanted to change BTLTW to BTLWTW, which would yield an infinitive Qal, > which is really the form that you want. > Best, > Ed Cook (I reply:) Yes it does hinge on the reading of BTWLTW as a form of TLH. At first I thought it must be an unusual orthography for Qal, as you suggest. But the interlinear waw argues against that. Therefore I think it is Piel. Although Qal is the usual expectation as you say in biblical Hebrew, there is a piel at Ezek. 27.10. Furthermore Qimron (1986: 49) referred to a general phenomonen of verbs in qal in BH appearing in Samaritan Hebrew, MH, and Qumran texts as piel. One example is at pNah 3-4 ii 7 quoting from Nah. 3.4 where MT qal 'hmkrt' appears in pN as piel 'hmmkrt'. The present case in 4Q282i becomes just one more example of this general qal/piel phenomenon. At 11QT(a) 48.3 whxwrgwl has the second waw superlinearly inserted, corresponding to MT patah vowel of hxrgl of Lev. 11.22. I noted a comment of D. Schwartz 1992 that in MH 'a lamedh may cause a preceding patah to turn into a vav', which would apply to the present case. I noted also waw of '$pwtwt at 4Q179 1 ii 7 corresponding to patah of '$ptwt of Lam. 4.5. The interlinear waw of 4Q282i BTWLTW makes no sense for a qal spelling, but corresponds to the patah of piel. On your second point objecting that it is unlikely that a short vowel indicated by a mater would be followed by defective T- ending, that might be a point but I'm unconvinced. (a) in fact the scribe did write the word at first defectively at both positions (as per what you are suggesting would be expected, given the defective ending). But then the scribe corrected, with the interlinear waw (but without correcting the defective ending). (b) the reading doesn't make sense to me any other way, e.g. as qal, or as 'virgin' (nothing wrong with Fitzmyer's 'virgin' in terms of orthography; but it makes less sense in context). I think this explanation in terms of piel makes better sense than the suggestion that the interlinear waw insertion was an error or inserted wrongly. That was an error correction; the scribe did that consciously and intentionally; the interlinear waw is unlikely to have been a mistake. And for the reasons above there is no problem with a piel form, in light of the larger qal/piel pattern generally. This is how I see it. But thanks very much for the comment and the suggestion. Greg Doudna For private reply, e-mail to "Greg Doudna" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from Orion, e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: "unsubscribe Orion." Archives are on the Orion Web site, http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il. (PLEASE REMOVE THIS TRAILOR BEFORE REPLYING TO THE MESSAGE)
