התפתחותו של השימוש התחבירי של המספרים 3-10 בעברית המקראית- לפי הממצא בספר דברי הימים-

Abstract

The diachronic study on Biblical Hebrew presents a clear cut between the Hebrew of the First Temple period (Classical or Standard Biblical Hebrew) and that of the Second Temple period (Late Biblical Hebrew). One of the subjects in this discipline has been the linguistic phenomenon around the numerical syntax in Late Biblical Hebrew. It is clearly observed that there began a new type of syntactical usage in the numerals 3-10 in the writings of the Second Temple period, while one may define a classical type of numerical syntax in the books written before the Exile. The subject has been studied since the 2nd half of the 19th century. Some German scholars (Gesenius, Herner, König) carried out basic but quite detailed studies without much intension of diachronic approach in the subject at the beginning. Later Kropat added other aspects in the subject in his study of Chronicles’ Hebrew. It was Polzin who brought the numerical syntax in light of diachronic development of Late Biblical Hebrew. Polzin rejects Kropat’s suggestion that the new syntactical usage of numerals is due to Aramaic influence. Recently, Weitzman presents a new interpretation of ‘parallel development’ which denies both synchronic and diachronic explanations. However, there has been a difficulty in this study - deficiency in data analysis. There is a practical need to re-check all the relevant numerical examples in the subject. And that is why this work was done. The present work limits its examination in syntactical behavior of the numerals 3-10 in Biblical Hebrew of Chronicles. It also inquires into the syntactical usage of 3-10 in their Vorlage, i.e., in the Biblical Hebrew of the books of Samuel and Kings. The comparison between the two corpora is to present cases for the historical shift in the numerical syntax. In fact, the result of investigation shows a clear diachronic development in the syntactical usage of the numerals 3-10 in Chronicles.