[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: orion Shanks DSS book
[The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set]
[Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
[Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]
As I said, it serves no purpose. The reduplicated sigmas of "Essaioi"
suggest one of the so-called "intensive stems", which require the doubling
of the second letter of a given root. In the event, however, the form in
question would have to be a participle. But all the participles of the
intensive stems in Hebrew have Mem as preformative element, resulting not
in ´ssym, but in m´ssym, if the root was indeed ´sy. The alternative is to
take the form as the result of a root in the Qal, which would not have the
preformative element. However, in *that* eventuality the vowel of the first
syllable would have to be a long and non-reducible o. In the Greek
transcriptions in Origen's secunda columna, a short o sometimes gets
represented as an e, but never, to my knowledge, a long one. Hence the verb
´asah, no matter how you contort it, cannot provide a form that would
result in `essaioi. To claim otherwise is to make nonsense of Hebrew
morphology and phonology. It would be special pleading of a rarified sort.
Gorenson should know better; I'm sure the rest of you do.
Fred Cryer