Comments on: Tagged

By: JoelNothman.com » Tagged in turn

JoelNothman.com » Tagged in turn — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:24:49 +0000

[...] only quoting from Waltke and O’Connor’s, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, but then discussing the fascinating notion of honorific plurals in Biblical Hebrew (among [...]

By: Joel Nothman

Joel Nothman — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:11:27 +0000

Jen is not alone in having heard the idea that plural name for God implies plural God in the essence. And precisely because of this is the notion of honorific plurals very significant in theological bible study.

At the same time, “אדני” as referring to God is usually understood to be a variation, but not identical to, the plural form of אדון with a first person suffix. The latter is usually אֲדֹנַי and the former אֲדֹנָי. In fact, this becomes a significant issue for poseqim as regards Ashkenazim adopting the more limited set of Sefaradi vowels.

By: Jen

Jen — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:07:16 +0000

Oh and other things I meant to say before I hit the Enter key: You should probably be grateful that the manga book by my elbow has less than 123 pages. And how the dickens do you know Q-Pheevr? I only ‘know’ him as a commenter on one of my livejournal friends’ pages, and it makes for an intriguing six degrees of separation..

By: Jen

Jen — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:02:36 +0000

I believe that the plurality of God’s name was used as an argument by Ghil’ad Zuckermann that Judaism used to be just as polytheistic as all the other local religions of the time.

By: John Hobbins

John Hobbins — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:14:43 +0000

Very nice, Simon.

Is hochmot in Prov 1:20 and 9:1 honorific, too? Just wondering out loud.

I thought your piece on mishpatim and your brother’s bar mitzvah was splendid.

Did you notice the raucous debate about the TAM system of the verb in ancient Hebrew on my blog? I’m hoping you will join the fray.

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:49:15 +0000

Yes, you are quite right. The word אדון does appear for God, but my point was that any time it takes a suffix it takes one for a plural noun. Your אדוני example is better than my אדונינו example simply because it occurs far more often, but I’m not sure what you mean by “simplest”? The simplest would be אדונים or אדון, right?

Don’t give up your day job!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:44:57 +0000

It’ll have to wait (some of us have day jobs to go to :) ), but I just wanted to point out that the “simplest” term for the Hebrew deity – “Adonai” – is in the plural (otherwise it would be “Adoni”).