Determination and the Definite Article in Biblical Hebrew

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Journal of Semitic Studies X X X I V / 2 Autumn

'D E T E R M I N A T I O N ' A N D T H E D E F I N I T EARTICLE IN BIBLICAL HEBREWJ A M E S B A R R

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

The definite article in the Semitic languages formed the subjectof one of Edward UllendorfPs early contributions to linguistics.1In it he pursued the elusive theme of the earliest form of thearticle, and in so doing he reached far out into comparativeSemitics, with a special emphasis on the Arabic evidence. Heexpressly left aside, however, the question of 'the variousmeans of rendering a noun definite'. This present contributionin his honour will follow his lead in entering into the appar-ently simple, but in fact very tricky, territory of the definitearticle. But it will approach the subject from a quite differentpoint of view. It will confine itself almost entirely to BiblicalHebrew and will for the most part leave other Semitic lan-guages alone; and it will have nothing to say about the form ofthe article, whether its original form or the form that it has inhistorical times, and will concern itself entirely with Mat functionof the article. Some might say that this is perfectly plain andthat no fresh discussion is needed. But, as Ullendorff foundwith the form of the article, so with its function there is a greatdeal that requires to be reconsidered and clarified.It seems to be usually supposed that the central function ofthe Hebrew definite article is fairly plain and easy to under-stand. 'The definite article of Hebrew corresponds closely tothe definite article of English in usage and meaning', we aretold in the modern and widely-used grammar of Lambdin(p. 5). Similarly the more advanced and detailed grammar ofGesenius-Kautzsch: 'the article is, generally speaking, em-

1 E. Ullendorff, 'The form of the Definite Article in Arabic and otherSemitic languages', published in the Gibb Festschrift (1965) and also inE. Ullendorff, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? (Wiesbaden 1977), 165-71. Hisno te 1 (p. 165 of the latter) makes it clear that the p rincipal a rgum ents ofthe paper had been advanced by him much earlier, no doubt around theearly forties.37

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWployed to determine a substantive wherever it is required byGreek and English' (Gesenius-Kautzsch 126d, p . 440). 'Deter -mination' or 'making definite' is the standard foundation foraccounts of the matter. Thus melek is 'king', a king, any king,but ha-melek is the king, the one already definitely identified andknown about (following a common modern transliterationstyle, the gemination of consonants after the article is ignoredin these pages). The 'determined' status that attaches to ha-melek belongs also to nouns with a pronoun suffix [malko 'hisking', which therefore does not have the article), and to thosein typical construct chains {melek ha-'ares 'the king of thecountry', where the article is attached to the last member of thephrase but not to the word 'king' itself). These principles arevery essential for the initial learning of Hebrew but fortunatelythey are easily learned and they work well enough in thousandsof cases, indeed no doubt in all that the beginner is likelyto have to cope w ith. A m odern gramm ar like that of J. F. A.Sawyer, A Modern Introduction to Biblical Hebrew ( L o n d o n1976), pp. iyf., continues the accepted tradition: 'The prefix[ = article] makes the noun definite: it is not dabar "a word","any word you like" (indefinite), but ha-dabar "the word, theone we have been thinking about, the one just mentioned"(definite)'. As a strategy of approach to the language this worksexcellently.

The trouble begins when we seek to make more detailed andexhaustive statements, including different types of nouns, textsof different sorts and periods, marginal cases and apparentexceptions. Grammars for beginners can hardly be expected togo into these difficult areas. Among the more exhaustivereference grammars the two important German works ofBergstrasser and of Bauer and Leander were never completedand thus failed to handle, the top ic: for grammars, whichnormally handle the form of the article at an early stage,customarily consider its function to come under 'Syntax', whichis relegated to a later section. Among the treatises whichconsider our subject in some detail we may mention: GK 126,pp. 404-10; Joiion 137, p p. 420-8; Brockelmann, HebrdischeSyntax 20-21, pp. 17-19; R. J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax 82-93,p p . 19-21; Let t inga, Grammatica van het bijbels Hebreeuws 6 8 ,p p . 157-9; a ^ s o n* s corresponding French edi t ion Grammaire deIhe'breu biblique 6 8 , p p. 158-60. O f these the m ost detailedseems to be Joiion. J . Blau, A Gramm ar oj Biblical Hebrew', has

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWonly a very brief allusion, 84, pp. 93f. An older work is A. B.Davidson, Hebrew Syntax (2nd edn., Edinburgh 1896).The classic treatments of our subject contain various difficul-ties and unclarities, as follows:1. I r 'determination' {determination, Bepaaldheid) a linguistic cate-gory or a logical? The article, we are told, marks or indicatesdetermination. Determination must therefore be a sort ofmeaning, a logical feature which can be explained in logicalterms. But when we ask 'What is determination anyway?' weall too often seem to receive the circular answer: when a nounhas the article, then it is determined. Expressions like rvirddeterminiert are actually used to state the fact that a noun ofsuch and such a kind has the article. Similarly, whole sectionsof the grammar may be found to have the title 'Determinationby means of the Article' (so GK and Brockelmann, and in partalso Joiion), and this well symbolizes the problem: unless thelogical feature of determination, and the presence of theHebrew article, coincide exactly, the section should have eitherthe article as its theme or determination as its theme. Lettingahere does better, entitling his section simply 'the Article' (Het~Lidwoord). For it must be obvious, even from the mosttraditional of treatments, that determination and the use of theHebrew article do not coincide. This present study will arguethat the Hebrew definite article is not strictly, but only looselyand generally, related to determination. Although determina-tion is extremely important and highly characteristic as afunction, it is cut across by a number of quite other considera-tions and factors, historical, stylistic, syntactic and (probably)lexical. The attempt to account for the many different usages interms of determination as the sole guiding principle can there-fore only lead to confusions of statement.

Thus Brockelmann tells us (his 21c a, p. 18) that words like'sun' or 'earth' are in their nature unique and thus are 'inthemselves determined' {an sich determiniert) and therefore havethe article. Lettinga, by contrast, tells us that words like tebel'universe' or t'hom 'ocean' count as proper names, 'which arealready determined in themselves', and therefore do not take thearticle (his 68c, p. 158). What kind of criteria can there be forassessing such statements, whichever of them may be right?And what value can there be in establishing a principle such as

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWBrockelmann's when - as he well knew - 'sun' is particularlyoften without the article anyway?Problems of this kind recur again and again in the classictreatments. On the one hand there is a haphazard mingling oflogical and linguistic arguments and categories; at other pointsone has to fall back on the vague assurance that it is all muchthe same as having the article in English (Greek, Dutch,French etc.). The classic works tend to select and interpret theevidence in such a way as to make it appear to point towardsdetermination as the governing principle; and when they cometo evidence that points in another direction they sometimes tryto interpret it as if, though the word is not determined, theHebrews thought of it as based on determination. As will beshown below, many of the examples traditionally cited areactually cases of minority usage and are thus contrary to themain linguistic pattern of the Bible. Dependence on logicalnotions can be seen in GK i26m ,n, w here it is explained thatabstract nouns and the names of materials like 'silver' have thearticle because they represent whole classes of attributes orstates. Yet 'silver' without article is very common, and notonly in poetry, where it is recognized that the article is oftenomitted: which brings us to our next main point.2. Non-use of the article in poetry is doubtless recognized by allwriters, though some say little about it, and probably all wouldagree with Blau that poetic usage represents an older stage ofthe language. But none of the standard treatments seem tonotice the obvious and necessary consequences. They handlethe phenomenon as if the article had the function of determina-tion but that in poetry it was frequently omitted. But, if thearticle can be simply 'omitted' in large sections of the Bible, theeffect is to break any rigid link between the article anddetermination. In these sections nouns are determined, itseems, without article. This is no mere 'omission': on thecontrary, it may mean, perhaps indeed it must mean, that anentirely different system is operative from that which we knowon the basis of the 'normal' usage centred on determination.For example, in poetry, if nouns can be determined withouthaving the article, perhaps they can equally have the articlewithout being determined? Or, still more seriously: if therewere texts in which nouns were determined (in meaning)without having the article, what is the function of the article

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWwhen it does appear in such a text? Remarkably, such questionsare normally not even raised. Poetic usage is treated as if itconstituted no more than a series of omissions of the articlethat in prose is normal.As already stated, it would be agreed that the poetic usagecomes from an earlier stage of the language. And it wouldprobably be agreed that this older usage has left its traces inclassical prose in various particular words and phrases, forinstance in 'earth and heaven' (both without article, Gen. 2:4)or 'to the rising of the sun, i.e. to the east', where we can findfemes 'sun' without article at Deut. 4:41, 47; Judg. 11:18, 20,43, but with article in similar texts at Josh . 1:15, 12 :1, 13 :5;Judg. 21:19, etc. The older usage crops up within the newer:both forms are possible, article is optional, and determinationplays no part in the choice between its presence and its absence.But this, if true, means that the article calls for a historicalaccount of itself, when what we have been offering has beenthe reverse of historical. We have talked as if the classical usagewas the point of origin, from which poetry diverged by its'omissions', when in fact poetry might provide for us the keysto peculiarities of the prose usage.For, if we may accept that there was at some time a Hebrewin which determination was not marked by the article, how didone get from this to the stage familiar in classical Hebrewwhere determination is (shall we say?) normal with the article?One can hardly suppose that someone decreed that all deter-mined nouns were to have the article, and that this was to beextended to all adjectives accompanying these nouns, pro-ducing at times these strings of three or four articles that wenow see. There must have been some feature or features, in theforms which later came to be our article, which developed intothis primary role of marking determination.There is thus, at least in principle, room for something like ahistory of the article that would start from poetic usage andmove downwards to the position found in classical times.Moreover, a task of this kind does not depend purely onphilological reconstruction, for it seems that the Bible itselfcontains valuable material for such work. Poetic usage is not anunmarked chaos in which the rules of classical prose areneglected: on the contrary, a study of the article in poetic textsquickly reveals a high degree of difference in the degree towhich the article is used. Some Psalms have far more articles

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D E T E R M I N A T I O N IN BIBLICAL HEBREWthan others do, and some have articles of one type much morethan others (more on this below). As far back as 1898, MayerLambert noted that the Song of Songs, though unquestionablya poetic book, uses the article in just the same way as the prosebooks do, and that this is true also of certain Psalms, whichmay well be latish.2 Before we can embark on a census of thenumber of articles in poetic texts, or an analysis of the sorts towhich they belong, we have to consider certain other matterswhich will be mentioned shortly. For the present we simplyreiterate the historical role of the older and poetic stratum ingenerating the practices of classical prose.3. The article seems, by any sensible evaluation, sometimes to go withclear non-determination, and even in prose.

The central case is the well-known Amos 5:19: 'It is as if aman fled before ha-'ari (the? lion) and was met by ha-dob (the?bear), and went into the house and leant his hand on the walland the (?) snake bit him.' Enormous explanatory ingenuity isrequired in order to make this into a case of determination.'Peculiar to Hebrew', write GK i26q, p. 407, 'is the employ-ment of the article to denote a single person or thing (primarilyone which is as yet unknown, and therefore not capable ofbeing defined) as being present to the mind under givencircumstances.' And Amos 5:19 is the first example given.Another is Amos 3:12: 'as the shepherd saves from the mouthof the lion (fragments of a sheep)'. The person, animal or thing,as yet unknown, is 'determined' in the sense that the story-teller or prophet knows that it is going to appear in his story orcomparison. Something similar may be found in very colloquialusage in English, especially perhaps among children, with thedemonstrative this:1

'I was just walking through the woods, and this dog jumpedout at me.''What do you mean by "this dog"? You haven't mentionedany dog.''Well, obviously, the dog-I'm going to tell you about, thedog in my story.'2 M. Lambert, 'L'article dans la poesie hebrai'que', Revue des Etudes Juives(1898), 203-9; quotation from p. 203.3 It is interesting that E. Osty in his French translation of the Bible,commenting on 'the' lion of 1 Kgs. 20:36 (his p. 70m.), says: '"le lion",comme dans nos contes populaires "la bete", "le loup", etc. '.

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWWill this sort of 'story-telling intention' account for the Hebrewarticle in the cases cited above? And, if so, will it explain whyNoah sent out from the ark 'the' raven and 'the' dove (Gen.8:7, 8)? Will it explain why 'the' survivor escaped to tellAbraham of the battle of the kings (Gen. 14:13)? Will itexplain why a prophet, telling a man that a lion would kill him,gives this lion an article (1 Kgs. 20:36); similarly, again withlion or bear, at 1 Sam. 17:34, 36, 37?Before we go further a distinction must be made. Certaincases can be explained through assumption of the existence ofsomething: thus 'words that are presupposed as given by thesituation' (Brockelmann, 21b, p. 18) or 'to specify persons orthings, which are so far definite as to be naturally thought of inconnexion with a given case, and must be assumed accordinglyto be there' (GK i2 6g (g), p. 405). Thus in G en. 18:7Abraham, receiving his angelic visitors, runs and takes a calfand gives it to 'the' servant (ha-na'ar), though no such servanthas been mentioned. One can accept it as obvious that Abra-ham would have a servant. Similarly, where someone saddlesan ass for a journey and the article is used although the animalhas not been mentioned before, e.g. Exod. 4:20 of Moses andhis family. The servant and the ass can certainly be presumed.Similarly, in modern English 'he got the children into the carand went off: even if the person has not been mentioned ashaving a car, car ownership is a cultural presupposition.But this explanation will not work for the instances we havejust been discussing. The nouns with article designate elementsthat are characteristically novel in the situation: certainly so thesurvivor who arrived at Abraham's camp, or the man who wastold he was going to be killed by a lion; certainly, again, atAmos 5:19 the lion, the bear and the snake were unexpected tothe hearer and not to be assumed on the basis of the circum-stances. We cannot help noting, in addition, how many of thesecases concern sudden interventions of animals in human affairs.Another case to consider under the idea of cultural assump-tion is ba-seper ' in writing, in a book or document'. Whensomeone writes something down, and though there has beenno previous mention of a book or document which would'determine' the noun, we nevertheless find that it is writtenwith article, and never as b'-seper without article: so forinstance Exod. 17:14, Num . 5:23, 1 Sam. 10:25, Jo b 19:23.(The element b'-seper does of course occur, as part of a



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWconstruct chain, as in 'in the book of the law of Moses', butthat does not count for our purposes). We cannot suppose thatit was culturally assumed that all these people would have abook or a writing document with them. Nor can we seriouslyfollow the story-telling explanation that argues: 'He wrote it inthe book.' - 'What book?' - 'Why, the book I'm just going totell you about.' Still more, add Isa. 34:4: the heavens are to berolled up like 'the' seper. Why the article? Did the writer mean:like the scroll, i.e. the one that was in my mind when I made upmy simile? Hardly. It is much easier to go in the oppositedirection, and agree that the article with seper in these casesdoes not mark determination at all. One may say: it is likeEnglish 'he spoke to me on the phone', not 'on a phone'.Possibly so. But that comes to the same result: the article doesnot indicate a known book, or a particular book: in spite of thearticle, the meaning is 'in a writing', 'in a book'.It therefore becomes easier to accept that a case like Amos5:19 is indeed an example where the article is used, but isunrelated to determination. The traditional explanations fail toprovide a proper account of the passage. Even if the prophethas them in his mind as the matter of his simile, the lion, thebear and the snake are still really undetermined. They are notparticular animals about which we are soon to hear more:rather, they are animals momentarily conceived for the sake ofa comparison. Any lion, any bear and any snake will have thesame effect. Moreover, if the lion, the bear and the snakedeserve an article because they have a place in the simile and inthat sense are (even if only in the writer's mind) 'determined',why is the man himself, who is equally part of the simile andwho is about to suffer from all these beasts, not himself equally'determined' by the presence of an article? He remains just V/'aman'; why not ha- 'is 'the man', like the other elements in thesentence? It is really far easier to say that the article hereaccompanies non-determination. It was never anything otherthan 'a lion', 'a bear' and 'a snake': theories that tried to explainthis as some kind of 'determination' have been sophistries.

Another possible approach might be to explain the termslike 'lion' as essentially collectivities, which would then have thearticle on the analogy of names of plagues and illnesses, whichnormally have the article in Hebrew (see further below), as inEnglish with familiar terms ('he's got the mumps', 'he died ofthe German measles'). Some interpreters have taken David's314




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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWspeech in i Sam. 17:34ff. in this sense, David having quelledsuccessive attacks by the lion family and the bear family.Maybe: though I doubt it. But in any case, even if this is apossible explanation, it does not lead to determination in theusual sense. It leads to the genus of lion or of bear, not to thespecific lion or bear. Moreover, this interpretation introducesan element that is ill supported from usage elsewhere, for aword like 'lion' is well enough evidenced in prose texts and ismanifestly subject to the usual 'determination' by article: e.g. in1 Kgs. 13:24 'a lion' (without article, since not yet known of)meets and kills the old prophet, but thereafter it (this indivi-dual lion) is with article throughout, correctly obeying thetraditional rules. Lions, unlike diseases, are subject to normaldetermination; but there are cases where the article does notimply determination, such as Amos 5:19 and others. In anycase, whatever applies to animals, the refugee of Gen. 14:13 isin a different category.

It is not insignificant that translations into other languageswhich have an article of some kind have generally used anindefinite article in such cases. Unsophisticated in modernterminologies as they may have been, the translators could seethat the persons, animals and things were unspecified. Thuseven a rather literal English version like KJV, which onemight have expected to use the English definite article torepresent the Hebrew definite article, does not do so. Thus ithas: 'As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; orwent into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and aserpent bit him' (Amos 5:19); or 'And there came one that hadescaped' (Gen. 14:13); or 'Thy servant kept his father's sheep,and there came a lion, and a bear' (1 Sam. 17:34); or 'As soonas thou art departed from me, a lion shall slay thee. And assoon as he was departed from him, a lion found him, and slewhim' (1 Kgs. 20:36). Naturally, translations in themselves donot prove anything. But they do indicate something, and all themore so with the rather literal style of KJV, which would havebeen at pains to follow any indications of the text if itperceived them. The translators have seen that - to use amodern terminology unknown to them - the 'definite' articlehere belongs to the surface structure of Hebrew (and hence is'peculiar to Hebrew', as GK put it). For some reason, whichwe may not yet understand, a definite article was placed here inHebrew; but determination, which is the common meaning of

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWthat article, did not belong to the deep structure of meaning.And so likewise in KJV Noah sent out 'a raven' and 'a dove'.Naturally, not all translations agree at each point. Some maybe literalist, and consider that, if there is an article in Hebrew,there must be an article or other sign of determination inEnglish or whatever other language it may be. At each pointthere may be differences of interpretation. Thus the finemodern version of the Jewish Publication Society of America,The Torah (Philadelphia, 1962), tells us that Noah 'sent out theraven' and 'sent out the dove', giving determination in Englishto fit the Hebrew article. But at Gen. 19:7 we read in the sameversion that Abraham 'gave it to a serving-boy', in other wordsabandoning determination at a point where it could easily bewell justified, as seen above: and similarly at Exod. 4:20, whereit tells us that 'Moses took his wife and sons, mounted them onan ass, and went back to the land of Egypt'. An ass? Just anyass? Should we not assume, on the grounds of the Hebrewarticle, that this was Moses' own personal ass? Of course itwas.The question could be pursued through a variety of ver-sions, in French, Spanish, and Greek as well as English: butenough has been said to give foundation to our remarks:although at one point or another interpretative wiles maysupport a different interpretation, translations in general haveaccepted that in certain cases, ill-defined no doubt, the presenceof the article in Hebrew was no certain indicator of determina-tion in the customary sense. And in this, I think, theirjudgement, based on no thorough philological or logical analy-sis but on the normalities and common-sense suggestions of thecontext, was often rather sound. There are a goodly number ofcases in important places, in which, for reasons still undeter-mined, the Hebrew article is used and yet the natural meaningmust be non-determination. Common sense, as distinct fromliteralist grammatical rigidity, makes it clear. The article isused, in classical Hebrew, in a smallish but irreducible andsignificant number of cases, with nouns which in meaning arenot at all 'definite' or 'determined'. Even if we cannot offer aclear reason for it, the fact is so.4. Abstract nouns. The use of the article with abstract nouns isanother area that is misrepresented in many textbook accounts:on the whole, these exaggerate the extent to which the article is

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWused with abstracts. It is little short of extraordinary toperceive how the classic accounts cite and emphasize the caseswhere abstracts have the article, while concealing the fact thatwith the same words the art icle is much more often omitted.The reason for this, once again, appears to lie in theoretical,pseudo-logical , notions. Thus GK i26n (c) tel l us that thearticle is used 'for the expression of abstract ideas of everykind, since they are likewise used to represent whole classes ofattributes or states, physical or moral defects, &c'. This is partof their endeavour to classify all possible usages as a kind ofdetermination, since classes, they think, are 'closely circum-scribed, and therefore well defined'. Brockelmann under his n c y, p. 18, says that the abstracts of properties and activitiestake the article, while abstracts 'which are designated accordingto their individual manifestations ' {die nach ihren einyelnen Er-scheinungen be^eichnet werderi) remain 'undetermined' , i .e . do nothave the article. It is difficult to know how this very theoreticaldist inction can be upheld, or even be understood.

Consider a few examples. Hiram from Tyre was full ofwisdom, unders tanding and knowledge (hokma, t'buna andda'at) at i Kgs. 7:14, and each word with article, a case citedby Broc kelma nn, 2 ic y, p. 18, in favour o f the use of thearticle with abstract terms. But the value of this is muchreduced when we note that Bezaleel , an equally prominentcraftsman doing exactly the same sort of work, is filled withexactly the same qualities, in the same order of words, in Exod.31:3 , 35:31, plus two of the same three at Ex od . 36 :1 , and allof these without art icle. The dominant usage is without art icle.

Similarly, G K 1260 (n ), p. 407, cite Pro v. 25:5 ba-sedeq 'inrighteousness', but fail to remark that this is an exceptional usefor this noun: it is in fact the only instance of this phrase withthe article, while b'-sedeq without art icle occurs thirteen t imesand sedeq without preposit ion is massively without art icle.Some other tradit ional examples may well not belong to thecategory that they are used to exemplify. For instance, a casevery commonly quoted is Gen. 19:11 'and they smote the men

with blindness (ba-saniverim)': this is supposed to be a prime caseof the article w ith an abstrac t n ou n. See G K 126n (c);Broc kelm ann, p. 18 und er y; Lett inga p. 158 (D utch) andp. 159 (French). But this heavily-worked example is probablynot in this category: for samverim cannot plausibly be countedas an abstract noun at al l . It does not mean 'blindness ' but must317




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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWbe the name for a defect or pathological state, like glaucoma orcataract, or just dazzlement or spots before the eyes, and for allsuch words the article is common: thus all the defects andplagues listed in Lev. 26:16, Deut. 28:22, have the article. Ofcourse the effect was blindness but the word itself cannot betreated as a real abstract.Another type often cited is the phrase to 'bring evil uponsomeone' etc., with article. 1 Kgs. 21:29 is often quoted: 'in hisson's days I will bring evil upon his house': cf. Brockelmann,2 ic Y> p -1 8 ; Lettinga, 68e.2. Joiion is more correct inperceiving the limits of this (his 137J, p. 424 where he saysthat the article is used 'sometimes', parfois, and points to thecase just above, 1 Kgs. 21:21, where the same expression isused without the article).But even here Joiion does not perceive the real connection.At 1 Kg s. 21:21 God through the prophet announces 'I willbring evil [without article] upon you', but later on, becauseAhab has humbled himself, he postpones 'the evil', i.e. the evilalready mentioned. It is a straight case of determination. Thenoun is with article not because it is an abstract but because it,like any other noun, may be in a determined expression wherethe article is required by the common prose rules. It isremarkable that scholars who, as has been suggested here, ingeneral exaggerated the centrality of determination in theiraccount of the article, nevertheless at times tended to offer adifferent, and less good, account of it when determinationwould have worked very well; and this is notably the case withabstract expressions.

Thus the familiar somer ha-b'rit w'-ha-hesed at Deut. 7:9 maybe understood as 'keeping the covenant and the (i.e. theconsequent) faithfulness'; hesed is overwhelmingly withoutarticle except where determination is probable, plus a handfulof other cases. At Isa. 32:17 ma'ase ha-s'daqa is 'the work ofrighteousness', the entire phrase being determined but thearticle being attached as is normal to the last noun. Apart froma double case of determined phrase in this verse, the only case ofs'daqa with article is at Dan. 9:7. The masculine sedeq, justmentioned above, has three cases of a phrase with determina-tion as in 'the city of righteousness' at Isa. 1:26, and apart fromthese the exceptional Prov. 25:5 is the only case with article asagainst a large number without.It is difficult to generalize without a large and detailed

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWsurvey; but, at least with many relevant words, the use withoutarticle is greatly dominant. Where abstract nouns do have thearticle, unless it can be explained as normal determination,or through other factors some of which will be mentionedshortly, it is probable that the article makes no materialdifference: an abstract with the article is just the same as thesame word without it. But, since the use without article isgreatly dominant, there is no sense in connecting abstracts withdetermination through the argument that abstracts denoteclasses and classes are by their own nature in themselvesdetermined. Since abstracts are dominantly without article,except under rules that apply to other nouns as well, the sameargument should logically have led in the opposite direction: itshould have meant that the article, in the case of abstracts,usually had nothing to do with determination.

Grammars tend, innocently, to emphasize the use of articlewith abstract nouns as an aspect of difference from 'ourlanguages'. T hus Lettinga, 68e .2, p. 158, registers this as'afwijkend van het N ederlan ds', which may well be right for allI know. But the paradox in it is richly illustrated by the Frenchedition of the same work, which mentions this tendency assomething that is 'a la difference de ce qui est le cas dans noslangues' {ibid., p. 159). In fact the normal use of the article withabstract nouns is a very conspicuous feature of French, and onethat sets it at the other extreme from English, in which it isused very little in this context. As our argument has shown,biblical Hebrew is in this respect considerably closer to Englishthan to French.In general, then, the matter of abstract nouns, far fromconfirming the approach of the standard textbooks, encouragesus to look in some different direction altogether.5. Vocative functions. The use of the article in vocative expres-sions is much m entioned in the standard w orks. G K i26d (e),p. 405, say that it is so used 'very often'; so Brockelmann, io ,p. 7, 'meist durch den Artikel determiniert', though contraryexamples are given. R. J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax 34, 89(pp. 11, 20f.) says it is 'regularly' with the article; Lettinga hasa brief note under 2jd , p . 51. The most eloqu ent, and also themost revealing, is Joiion, who gives far more examples and amore detailed theoretical discussion (his i3 7g , p. 423). Aperson or thing addressed in the vocative, he says, is always

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWdetermined and therefore ought always to have the art icle. Infact however the article is fairly often omitted, especially inpoetry or in lofty prose. The article is generally present when itis a matter of persons who are present; when the persons arenot present, or are more or less imaginary, the article is oftenlacking. In fact, Joiion admits, there can be great freedom inthe inclusion or absence of the article. The evidence makesvery feeble the connection between vocative, determinationand article.

For one thing, some of the most quoted cases may verylikely be explained in another way. The commonly-cited ha-melek 'O K in g! ' ( i Sam. 17:55 , 2 Sam. 1 4:4 are usually quo ted)should be understood as an abbreviated form of the fullerphrase '"doni ha-melek 'my lord the King! ' which seems to bemuch commoner; and if this is so the truly vocative element isthe ''doni, determined by the pronoun suffix, to which ha-melekis in apposit ion. Common vocatives l ike 'Father! ' or 'Son!' aredone in the same way, 'abi, b'ni etc. , not with ha-'ab, ha-ben orthe like. Ha-sar ' commander! ' (2 Kgs. 9:5) would be the sameas with 'king'. The loss of this prime example series greatlyweakens the tradit ional explanation.And there are just so many cases where, in vocative expres-sions, the art icle is not used: Joiion does something to makethis clear, but many more examples can be added. The oldprophet addresses the altar as mi^beah mi^beah, twice withoutarticle, in 1 K gs . 13:2 , and th e bad boys sim ilarly call twiceupon Elijah as qereah with out art icle, 2 K gs . 2 :23 . In bo th casesone might have expected the article to fit quite well, but it doesnot appear. And these are not poetic texts in which 'omission'of the article was always accepted. But in poetry too we haveso many cases where the same vocative expressions exist bothwith and without the article: 'give ear, O heavens, and listen,O earth ' , with do uble art icle at Deu t. 3 2: 1 , and w ith no art icleat Isa. 1:2, as Joiion himself sees. As a whole, therefore, it isdifficult to be sure until one has made a survey of all vocativeexpressions in the Bible, but I suspect that the dominant use, inprose as well as in poetry, is that without the article. Surely itwas absurd to set up the principle that the vocative usageshould have the article, and then have to go on to recognizethat the actual grammar does not work this way at al l .

Moreover, even by the tradit ional logic which Joiion andother authorities use, it must be evident that ambiguity is320



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWpresent and the same argument can go in two different andopposite directions. One can say: vocative expressions are bynature determined, and therefore have the article (though it isfrequently omitted, it ought to be there). But one can also say:vocative expressions are by nature determined, and thereforedo not need the article; in this respect they are very similar topersonal names which, as everyone knows, never have thearticle. Greek, a language with express vocative forms, used noarticle with them. The dilemma is similar to that alreadytouched upon above, p . 309^ concerning lexemes that aresupposed to be 'naturally' determined. With the same logic onecan, perhaps, go either way, establishing either that the articleis in principle required or in principle avoided. When the actuallanguage, however, presents an undistinguishable and irreme-diable mixture of both, the best conclusion is that the principleof determination has no part in the matter at all.The traditional works, then, have probably exaggerated theextent of use of the article in vocative functions, and they havedone this in part because they thought that it supported aconnection with determination. In fact, far from supporting aconnection with determination, the vocative uses suggest thatthere is no connection with it at all. The presence or absence ofthe article in vocative functions has little or nothing to do withdetermination, and an explanation has to be looked for in somequite other direction. Might the ha- in vocative functions bemore a particle of deictic character, a particle of recognition,address, or introduction, rather than one of determination ?Thus even if the vocative uses are separate from any basis inthe principle of determination, they may be very significant forour subject. It is precisely those usages which are not foundedupon determination that may offer traces of earlier functions ofthe article out of which the dominant determinative usage ofclassical times arose. Scholars have been agreed that in Hebrew,as in many languages, the article had some sort of relationshipwith demonstrative elements. Most standard works mentionthis (G K i2 6a , p. 404; Joiion 35, p . 83; Brockelmann, byimplication, 2 ia , p. 17; Lettinga, iyf, 21a, pp.40, 42f.;Blau, 16.1, p. 43, and 84.1 with note, p. 93); but they makelittle use of it except to illuminate some limited and specialcases (e.g. ha-yom 'today'). Modern linguistics have made muchmore sophisticated studies of deixis, as this realm is now called.Of one stage in the development of the deictic elements, John

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWLyons writes: 'We can think of this deictic as meaning some-thing like "Look!" or "There!"' . 4 The vocative usages of theHebrew article could thus lead back to an older stage anteriorto the dominance of determination, familiar in the classicalperiod.In spite of our earlier statement that matters of comparativephilology would be largely left aside, one facet of it will betouched on here. In an article of 1959 K. Aartun discussed theorigins of the 'emphatic state' forms in Aramaic.5 He statedthat 'In Aramaic determination and vocative go hand in hand',cf. malkd which is both 'the king' and 'O King!' He suggestedthat the original Aramaic termination had the form *-jd- andthat it was 'not impossible' that this was the same element asthe Arabic vocative prefix yd. I do not feel able to comment onthe likelihood of these suggestions for Aramaic; but they areinteresting simply as a contact with, and an illustration of, thesort of thinking which has been developed above. And, ofcourse, it would not be out of the way to mention thesimilarity to the Hebrew ha- of the first element in the Arabicdemonstratives hddhd, hd'uld'i, and of the last element in thevocative form 'ayyuhd. I build no conclusions upon these pointsbut consider them to be suggestive for our discussion as awhole.To sum up, then, the vocative functions fit badly with thetreatment proposed in the standard works, and must point inanother direction, even if it still remains obscure what thatdirection is.6. The relative article. This term, though not widely used, isused by R. J. Williams and perhaps others and seems to be avery good designation; cf. Williams, 82, 90, pp. 2of. What ismeant is the article with participle, the type like Ps. 18:33 ha- 'elha-m''as^'reni 'the God who girds me'. As will be shown, thistype has several special features about it and is of considerableimportance. Most traditional grammars have some mention ofit but it is not well integrated with the other remarks about thearticle and it is not clear how the two are related. Cf. Brockel-mann 2id, p. 19, and 73b, p. 68; Joiion, 137I, p. 425. GK u 6 q , 126k have an obscure discussion, concentrating on the

4 J. Lyons, Semantics (Cam bridge 1977), p. 648.5 K. Aartun, 'Zur Frage des bestimmten Artikels im Aramaischen', AdaOrientalia 24 (1959), 5-14; quota tion s from pp . 13f.322




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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWquestion whether the relevant elements are subjects or predi-cates, a question that probably interests them because it mayaffect the question whether this sort of article can be subsumedunder determination or not. None of the textbooks seem to citethe sort of examples that are most important, especially in thepoetic literature.The relative article is important for our subject in severalways. First of all, here again it seems possible, or indeedprobable, that the article has a function other than that ofdetermination. Collocated as it is with a word that is not anormal noun but a partially verbal (participial) form, the articlehas a role more like that of a relative pronoun or relativeparticle: its function is to take up a word that is a constituentof an existing sentence and make it into the subject of asubordinate clause or phrase. One can see that this may oftencome close to determination, but it is not quite the same thing.Many cases with the relative article may be in fact determined,but it is not the relative article itself that makes them deter-mined. We would surely have to recognize that in biblicalHebrew one could say:

wayyar*yladim ha-m'sahaqim ba-gan'and he saw children who were playing in the garden' the children being 'undetermined' in the conventional termin-ology of Hebrew grammar. True, in a certain sense one maysay that 'children' , though originally undetermined, becomes inthe further mention determinate: i t is 'children' whom he saw,who were then indeterminate , who become ' the ' (determined)children for the following clause. Yes, but this does not alterthe si tuation: i t was children, not ' the ' children, who were thesubject. A good biblical case is Jer. 27:3: b'-yad mal'akim ha-ba'im ' in the hand of messengers who came'.

This phenomenon was seen as a possible difficulty by theScot tish H ebrais t A. B. D avidso n, w ho w ro te : 6Rem. 1. Of course the ptcp. with art. is not to be used as an ordinaryrel. clause after an indef. noun, only after def. words as pron., propername, or other defined word. In later style exceptions occur: Jer.27:3; 46:16; Ez. 2:3; 14:22; Ps. 119:21; Dan. 9:26, though in mostof these cases the preceding word is really def. though formallyundetermined.

6 A. B. Davidson, Hebrew Syntax (2nd edn. , Ed inb urg h 1896), p. 133.3*3



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWAll these arguments are special pleading, based on the stronginsistence that the article must go with determination. Withthis type of article it is simply not so. The usage of Jeremiah oreven Ezekiel is not to be depreciated as 'later style'. Thesuggestion that the preceding word is 'really definite', thoughnot marked as such, is an evasion of the problem.In the relative article, then, we have a usage that is notprimarily concerned with determination: it is not like thedifference between 'king' and 'the king'. It may certainly beattached to undetermined nouns. It may well indeed have acertain consequent determining effect. But that is just the point.

We are interested in usages that began outside the dominanceof determination and yet may in some respect have led towardsit. The second reason why the relative article is important isthat it forms an important group numerically within the poeticliterature, and notably within those (probably earlier?) poemsin which the article is quite rare (on the degree of rarity seefurther below). For instance, Ps. 103 has only a handful ofother articles in the entire poem of twenty-two verses, but itbegins with a series of five relative articles in vv. 3-5, startingwith ha-soleah 'he that forgives'. On the other hand the relativearticle can easily alternate with participles without article, andalso with other verb forms like imperfects. Thus in Ps. 104 theverses 2-4 have a series of participles all referring to G od: v. 2'ote, note; v. 3 ha-m'qare, ha-sam, ba-m'hallek; v. 4 'ose. The firsttwo and the last are without article; the middle three have thearticle. The article reminds of the antecedent subject and bringsit to expression; but it does not define any more than the otherparticiples define. Psalm 136, by contrast, though a poemwhich uses a much larger number of articles than many others,gives us a long string of participles all referring to God, andyet not one of these has the article; but they are interspersedwith purely verbal forms like perfects and imperfects. It is verylikely that these marked differences in proportion betoken somekind of diachronic shifts in the language. As a matter ofresearch strategy, it means, among other things, that instancesof the relative article must be noted and counted separatelyfrom other uses of the article.

Relative articles, and in prose, can have a kind of conditionalelement in their meaning. 2 Sam. 14:10 ha-m'dabber 'elayik,literally 'he that speaks to you', means 'if anyone says anything



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWto you' (RSV). The article is not here because of definiteness,but because it is syntactically necessary at this point in theconstruction. In respect of definiteness the meaning is verymuch the same as is to be found in participles which have noarticle (Gen. 9 :6 ; 1 Sam. 2:13).To sum up, then, the relative article has a main functionother than that of normal determination; it is frequent in somepoetic texts in which the usual article is rare; and it maypossibly suggest a path which leads from an older state of thelanguage, in which determination by the article was unusual, tothe classical state, in which such determination was central.7. The article in prepositional phrases. The writer has for a t imebeen making a survey of the use of the article in the poeticliterature, taking the Psalms as a basis, including the poemsembedded in the historical works (e.g. Gen . 49 ; Exod. 15;Deut. 32, 33; Judg. 5) and going on to Job, Song of Songs,Lamentations etc. One thing was immediately and overwhel-mingly evident, namely the high proportion of cases in which,in the Masoretic text, the article occurs in one-word preposi-tional phrases with the 'prefixed' or 'inseparable' prepositionsh, k and /. And this is particularly noticeable in poems whichappear to be of earlier date. Thus in the Song of the Sea,Exod. 15, we are not surprised to find many nouns withoutarticle: mayim v. %\yam vv. 8, 10; 'eres v. 12; 'qyeb v. 9. In fact,where it is the subject of a sentence, as in 'the enemy said' or'the waters were piled up', it appears that in this poem thearticle is not used at all, or hardly so: or, to put it intographic terms, the letter h of the definite article is nowhere tobe seen. But this is not the end of the story: there are a numberof articles in the poem; and all occur, quite clearly, in theposition that has been specified: where the noun in question iscollocated with one of the three prepositions b, k and /. So ba-yam 'in the sea', vv. 1, 4; ba-koah ' in strength', v. 6; ka-qas'iX\Yestraw', v. 7; ka-'operet 'like lead', v. 10; ba-'elim 'among thegods' , v. 11; ba-qodes 'in holiness', v. 11; ka-'eben 'like a (the?)stone ', v. 16. In this type of phrase the article is almost asregularly present as in other types it is absent. There are,however, cases without the article: b'-m'solot 'in the depths',v. 5. The longer, non-prefixed, preposition form k'mo- is notfollowed by the article, vv. 5, 8, nor does it appear after thephrase b'-leb 'in the m iddle o f, v. 8 (and cf. similar cases in

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWPs. 46:3, Prov. 23:34, 30:19, and a series of six in Ezek. 27-28).Where the noun has an adjective with it, no article is found:b'-mayim 'addirim v. 10, in other words where it is not a one-word prepositional phrase but a longer one.And these tendencies, though present in a very marked formin Exod. 15, reappear in a number of Psalms and other oldpoems. Psalm 18, for instance, a longish poem of fifty-oneverses, has three cases of the relative article as defined above,has three cases of ha- 'el 'God' plus one of ha- 'ares ' the earth';but it has seven of one-word prepositional phrases with b, k or/. Ps. 68, also surely an ancient text, seems to have two articlesonly in which the consonant h is written and no preposition isprefixed, but seven in one-word prepositional phrases. Not allpoems have this sort of pattern: we have already suggested thatthere was a development within poetry. But this pattern in thePsalms and other old poetic texts is very marked.The importance of the pattern is even more clearly seen if wenote, not the number of articles in each poem, but thedistribution of articles and article-less forms word by word inrepresentative lexemes as used especially in the Psalms. Forinstance, yam, absolute without article, is quite common, andwe also have the articled form ha-yam. But with the preposi-tions b, k and / there are simply no cases without article: thereare about twenty-two of ba-yam with article, and similarly fourof ka-yam and five of la-yam. In spite of the frequency of yamwithout article meaning 'the sea', there are no cases at all ofb'-yam. With the prepositions min 'from' and 'ad 'as far as', onthe other hand, we have many cases without article. With thelocal suffix -a {he locale),yamma ('towards the sea, to the west') isfound more often without article, but also with, and within thesame strata (e.g. geographical lists in Joshua).Another common word is samayim 'heaven'. Use without thearticle is common, e.g. in Isaiah and Psalms. But the locutionb'-hmayim 'in heaven', without article, does not occur: all casesare ba-Iamayim with article, twelve in the Psalms, seven in theProphets. With the other preposition / there are five, all witharticle. When we take cases with 'from', on the other hand,there is a goodly crop of mi/samayim without article thoughsome cases with min plus article do occur. With the local suffix-a all cases seem to be ha-famayma with article, eleven in all.Similarly, 'eres 'land, world' is common without article, withsomething approaching sixty in the Psalms in this sense. But 'in

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWthe land, in the world' is always with article, and similarlyla - 'ares. Unlike the case of samayim, however, 'arsa with localsuffix is always without article.I have collected data for many other relevant nouns but itwould be tedious to present more of it here. Let it be stated asa useful generalization that a number of fairly common nounsappear in poetry without article, but when combined with theprepositions b, k and / they are found to be very largely witharticle. This fact in itself at once makes it very unlikely thatdetermination is the basis for the presence of such articles.Now part of this evidence was taken into account in thetraditional accounts, but it was classified in an incorrect way.They tended to classify it as something that happened incomparisons. And it is true that comparisons do form part of thisevidence: mayim is mostly without article except where aparticular body of water was meant, but in the expression 'likewater' there are only three cases without article in the Bible butnineteen are ka-mayim with article, of these four in Psalms, fourin Job and one in Lamentations. But comparison essentiallyhad nothing to do with the matter: the same happened withany of the three inseparable prepositions, and in many words itis most conspicuous with b 'in'. Undoubtedly the stressing ofcomparisons was once again motivated by what were thoughtto be logical considerations. Thus G K 1260, p. 407, sayingthat the article is much used in comparisons, give the reason'since the object compared is treated not (as usually in English)individually but as a general term'; cf. similarly Joiion 1371,p. 424; Lettinga, p. 158 ey. article used in comparisons, but notwhen an adjective is added to the noun, and thus ka-seleg 'likesnow' with article, but k'-'es satul 'like a tree planted', withoutarticle, a point further exemplified by Joiion. All this, as hasbeen stated, had nothing to do with comparisons, for the samehappened with the other inseparable prepositions: it was, itappears, a syntactical matter, depending on collocation withthis or that particular preposition.

Or was it? For this brings us to one of the central questionsof all attempts to cope with the article. What if many of thesearticles, in ka-seleg or ba-samayim or other like expressions,simply were not there at all in the Hebrew of biblical times butwere created later by the reading tradition? A trace of thisproblem is visible in the textbooks, which sometimes point outthat, where a noun has the article but in collocation with the

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWpreposition b, k or /, the presence of the article is made visibleonly by the Masoretic pointing. Where the noun has nopreposition, by contrast, the h of the article is visible in theconsonantal text. According to a possible hypothesis, thereading tradition later inserted 'articles' (in effect, the voweladjustments which produced articles) into many of these shortphrases beginning with the preposition b, k and /. With phraseswhere the noun had a following adjective, like mayim rabbim,mayim 'addirim, or ces satul, they could not do this, because itwould have required an h for the article element on theadjective, and the insertion of new consonants in this way wasbeyond their power. Similarly, with other prepositions such asmin or k'mo, no article could be introduced without theinsertion of an h, and so the phrases with these prepositionsremain without article for the most part.These ideas are not new by any means. The writer had takenlittle account of them until he had already done a great deal ofstudy of the article, out of which the facts forced the problemupon his attention. But the article of M. Lambert in 1898 hadalready expressed amazement (p. 208) at the 'prodigious' use ofthe article in poetry when with the prepositions b, k and /, andexplained this as the result of a change in the traditionalpronunciation, noted all too faithfully by the Masora, analteration which had introduced the vocalization of prose intopoetry in so far as the consonantal text permitted it. But thisrevocalization of the poetic texts was done in a very inconsist-ent manner, producing many contradictions, some of which arelisted on Lambert's pp. 208 f. The existence of an article,Lambert concludes, cannot be considered certain unless it isattested by the consonantal text.

A similar position was taken by Julius Ley in a slightlyearlier article, which Lambert himself had not seen (his note 1on p. 203).7 Ley from the beginning confidently asserted thatthe later punctuators had made no distinction between poetryand prose and that, as a result, no cases of 'articles' createdthrough the vocalization of b, k and / could be taken seriously.Only those marked with h could be relied upon. Working inthis way, he could quickly assert that 44 of the 150 Psalms hadnot a single article in them. Most of the poems embedded in

7 J. Ley, 'Ober den Gebrauch des Artikels in der rhythmischen Poesieder Hebraer', in N eue Jahrbiicher fur P hilologie und P aedagogik (also known asjahrbiicb er fiir classische Philologie), 2te Abtei lung, vol . 144, (1891), 541-51.328



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWthe prose texts have none either. Standard expressions like ba-yom, kol-ha-yom are special cases and do not count either.Another large group of poems have no more than a singlearticle in them. Many chapters of Job had none, or next tonone; even Lamentations had extremely few.These articles have not remained unknown: GK mentionsthem in a footnote. But the standard works on syntax seem notto have drawn from them the consequences which they imply.Perhaps they were counted as somewhat marginal. Ley's argu-ment is, moreover, put forward as part of the demonstration ofhis metrical theories, and grammarians may have refrainedfrom citing his work because they did not wish to suggestacceptance of these ideas. But both articles indicate somethingthat is of central importance for any serious study of theHebrew article, and description of the functions of the lattercannot proceed until some account is taken of the questionsthen raised.For it may mean, if taken seriously, that the article cannot beproperly described on the basis of the Masoretic text. In itthere may be many, possibly hundreds, of 'articles' which werenever there in ancient times and to which therefore we cannotascribe meaning or function of the same kind as was possessedby those articles that were present and functioned within theHebrew of biblical times. Poetry, it seems, differs from prosenot only in that it 'omits' articles that by customary rules oughtto be there, but that it also may contain in the text hundreds ofarticles that were never part of this same poetry. A goodlynumber of the examples customarily cited may become uncer-tain. What it means, if right, is that one of the most fundamen-tal grammatical mechanisms of Hebrew cannot be correctlydescribed on the basis of the signs devoted to the marking ofit. Some sort of diachronic spectrum, covering a series ofdifferent levels, will become necessary.

Or is there an alternative? The alternative is this: that thepeculiar configurations, some of which we have described, suchas the plentiful attachment of the article to words with theprepositions b, k and /, when these same words are commonlywithout article in the same texts when not attached to theseprepositions, should be capable of explanation in terms ofhistorical linguistics. Can an account of them be given otherthan one depending on the sheer vagaries and chaotic inconsist-encies of the reading tradition and of the punctuators?

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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWAn answer to this question will certainly not be given, oreven attempted, within the limits of this article. But one or twopoints may usefully be made, points that might suggest an

approach through historical linguistics as an answer to thesequestions.First of all, although we cannot assume that every 'article'marked upon a preposition b, k or / in early poetry was 'really'there, it is unwise scepticism to suppose that none of themwere really there or that only those marked with the consonan-tal h can be taken as actual. Many early poems show evidenceof some articles, marked with h: if they had some, then theycould have had others, which are not marked with h. Thoughthe reading tradition was not always 'right', this is not anadequate reason for supposing that in this respect it was alwayswrong.Secondly, the reading tradition and the Masora should notbe treated as a sack of unintelligibility into which we thrustthings that we cannot explain. An account of them has to begiven. If, for example, as Ley maintains, they treated thepoetical literature by the rules applicable for prose, why didthey not do this more consistently? How did a process ofrevision, even an unconscious one, lead to the numerousinconsistencies some of which are listed, for instance, byLambert?Thirdly, part of our argument has been to show that therules and practices of use of the article, even in the centralbiblical period, were more fluid, varied and illogical thantraditional explanation has suggested. The use of the article wasin a process of change during - perhaps one should even say'throughout' - the biblical period; and I have said nothing ofthe post-biblical usage, which certainly deserves to be takeninto consideration here as well. This could mean that some ofthe reconstitution of patterns in the later reading tradition wasin continuity with processes that were taking place duringbiblical times; it could even mean that some of this reconstitu-tion was already under way within the formation of the Bible.

Central to the questions of this order, however, is that of thearticle with nouns with the prepositions b, k and / in poetictexts. Is this purely a creation of the later reading tradition, oris there something in the configuration of the evidence thatmay suggest that such phrases - or some of them - couldindeed have developed the use of the article earlier than the33



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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWsame nouns did when in another context? Is there a clue in thefact I have noticed - and now see noticed by Lambert long ago- that many such cases involve short words: jaw , tob, etc.? Isthere any path from the deictic foundation of the articletowards an explanation? For the moment I am content to leaveit here.There are, however, a number of possibly relevant analogiesin Hebrew usage, which ought to be mentioned. The first andmost obvious is the case of 'the sixth day' or 'the seventh day',where some passages have the diction yom ba-Iilsi or yomha-s'bi'i, with article on the adjective but not on the noun 'day'(e.g. Gen. 1:31; 2:3; Exod. 12:15 (twice)) but, as GK andother authorities rightly notice, when the preposition b ispresent all cases have article on both the noun and the numeraladjective (e.g. Gen. 2:2). It would be reasonable to supposethat the usage with article on the adjective only is the older,and was eventually replaced by the classical pattern where bothnoun and adjective have the article. Where the preposition bwas present it was revocalized to include the article element,but where it was not present the article could not be insertedwithout the addition of the necessary h to the consonantal text,and therefore the modification was not made.Another example which will occur to the reader is the ethnicterm 'Philistines'. It is well known that this word is over-whelmingly used without article: but, where prefixed by theprepositions b, k or /, it is in all cases (nearly twenty) providedwith the article. This again looks very similar to our problemwith the article in other words.In spite of these parallels, it remains somewhat difficult tobelieve that the reading tradition simply insisted on imposingthe article upon so many phrases with the prepositions b, k and/. One can of course say that they would have done the same toan even larger range of examples, but in other cases wereprevented because they could not do so without inserting thecharacteristic consonant h of the article. But the same argumentworks also in the opposite direction. From the many caseswithout the preposition, the reading tradition must haveknown that these same words were very frequently usedwithout article. They knew it very clearly, for instance, ofsamayim or of mayim, even in classical prose. And, if the readingtradition inserted articles, why did it not do so more consist-ently? Why did it insert it once in ba-sedeq (Prov. 25:5) but


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DETERMINATION IN BIBLICAL HEBREWleave it out in thirteen other cases of b'-sedeq? Why did it notvocalize for an article in be-'emet ' in truth'? Hosek 'darkness',when without preposition, massively prefers to be withoutarticle (over forty cases), and of the small handful with articlesome can be explained as normal determination, as when Goddivides between 'the' darkness, i.e. the darkness just men-tioned, and the light just mentioned. With the preposition 'in',however, all cases have the article, sixteen or so in number. Buthow can the reading tradition be supposed to have imposedthese sixteen articles, as if an article was necessary at thesepoints, when it itself ex bypothesi knew of the massive represen-tation of the same word without article?The case of 'the sixth day' or 'the seventh day' seems to meto be valid: most probably the older Hebrew applied onearticle to a phrase of this kind, and not two (double, triple andmultiple articles are notably lacking in poetry). The applicationof vocalization for article to jom after b was an assimilation tonormal classical usage. The case of 'Philistines' is less clear andmore peculiar. Certainly the dominant usage is without article,apart from the cases prefixed with the prepositions b, k and /,but it is difficult to explain the articles with prepositionsexclusively as the consequence of a language change, since thearticle written with h does also occur, though much lesscommonly, and in the same ancient texts (e.g. five times in iSamuel); and the existence of the article in that ancient stage isplentifully attested by the universal use of article with thesingular 'the Philistine'. The case of 'the Philistines' is indeedvery likely to be suggestive for the problem of the article, butit seems also to be a very anomalous case which may not betypical of all developments.Kasdim 'Chaldaeans' is informative, but in a different way.Here we have practically no cases with b, k and /, but we dohave good evidence about the article, and especially so fromJeremiah, who was speaking about his contemporaries. Exactfigures are of little use, since some examples may be counted asa geographical name rather than the name of persons. ButJeremiah seems to use the form with article more commonly,and it is represented especially in chs. 32, 37, 38-41, whilethe form without article is well represented in chs. 50-52.Naturally, it remains a question just when these chapters wereedited into their final form; but, in so far as these gentilics are

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Determination and the Definite Article in Biblical Hebrew

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