4QGenc 1 ii 18 Mlxnw pronunciation.^811
Q77 MT Gen 40:20 tdlh SV(1) – Lexical interchange.^812
4QGene 4 i-5 3 dlwh
811
See the comments in note above. The unexpected long form in the MT against the short form in the
manuscript from Qumran has been noted in E. Ulrich and F.M. Cross, Qumran Cave 4. VII, 42: “It is sur-
prising to find the h- ending in [the MT] rather than in 4QGenc, since the Hebrew at Qumran used this form
of the perfect tense fairly often.” As this instance indicates, as well as those similar at Q40, Q73, Q335 and
Q414, we cannot be certain that documents from Qumran that preserve ‘baroque’ spellings will employ that
orthographic style consistently against shorter spellings in the MT. In some cases the trend for longer Qum-
ran spellings against the MT is reversed. 812
It is possible that 4QGene reflects the interchange of the feminine form tdlh, a hoph‘al infinitive con-
struct from √dlw, “to bear,” with a form that was more grammatically suitable according to the scribe. Ac-
cording to J. Davila, "New Qumran Readings for the Joseph Story," The Madrid Qumran Congress: Pro-
ceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18-21 March, 1991 (eds L. Tre-
bolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; STDJ 11 Leiden: Brill, 1992) 169, this amounts to a “grammatical
smoothing over or ... a result of a phonetic haplography with the following t).” The former interpretation
requires that the form dlwh, a 3ms hiph‘il perfect, was viewed as suiting the context: h(rp t) dlwh Mwyb,
“on the day that Pharaoh was caused to have been born (i.e. Pharaoh’s birthday).” We suppose here that the
scribe of 4QGene failed to understand the passive verb tdlwh plus accusative h(rp t) in its original erga-
tive sense, where the marked object (Pharaoh) actually functioned grammatically as the subject of the pas-
sive verb tdlh. In this sense the phrase h(rp t) tdlh Mwyb could be rather literally translated “on Phar-
aoh’s day of being caused to be born.” This variant may be read as a grammatical difference, and may thus
be counted as OV(l). However, the exchange of the transitive finite verb dlwh for the intransitive infinitive
verb tdlh should properly be read as a lexical interchange given that the exchange significantly affects the
syntax of the whole verse. This type of variation is possibly due to synchronic changes in the syntax of the
spoken language, and is more properly considered a variant in style rather than linguistic form. On this see
E.Y. Kutscher, A History of the Hebrew Language (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982) 82, §122, and the references
there. On the object marker t) as marking the subject of a passive verb in an ergative clause see B.K.
Waltke and M. O'Connor, Biblical Hebrew Syntax, 178-79, and F.I. Andersen, "Passive and Ergative in
Hebrew," Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (ed. H. Goedicke; Baltimore: Johnn
Hopkins, 1971). Alternatively, an indefinite subject might be read here following the suggestion of P.
Joüon and T. Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 461-62, so that t) tdlh Mwyb h(rp would be trans-
lated “on the day of (somebody’s) bearing Pharaoh.” The problem with this reading is that it fails to take
full account of the passive sense of the hoph‘al verbal form, even though the transitive sense of the verb
and the proper accusative function of the object marker are maintained.