An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

‘He, himself (NOMINATIVE), kept the law and He kept the law itself
(ACCUSATIVE). It resembles Greek autos and Latin ipse, both sometimes used
for emphasis, and like them it can be omitted from the text without obscuring the
grammar. This explanation of the particle’s meaning harmonizes well with the
facts that the particle is used in Mishnaic Hebrew as a demonstrative 33 and is
found almost exclusively with determinate nouns.
c One could argue that תא was originally a sign of the accusative with active verbs
and that in the historical development of the language it was reinterpreted as the
subject of an equivalent passive construction. So, for example, ךְוֹנחֲ ד ַלָי
דרי ָ ִע־תא ֶ ‘Enoch begat Irad,’ is equivalent to דרי ָ ִע־תא ֶ ךְוֹנחֲ ַל ד ֵלוִּיּ ָ וַ
, ‘To
Enoch was born Irad’ (Gen 4:18). This gave rise, the argument would continue, to
the kind of construction known as ergative, in which the morphological marking
of the subject of an intransitive verb is the same as the direct object of a transitive
verb. Thus a hypothetical ergative English paraphrase of ‘John moved her’ would
be ‘her moved by John.’ The final step, one could conclude the argument, is that
even this trace of the original passive construction became lost. Such a
development is attested in the movement from early Indo-Iranian to Hindi and
Modern Persian. 34 The reconstruction would also find support in the cognate
Semitic languages,[Page 179] where the accusative case ending is sometimes
found with the subject of passive verbs, and from the lack of grammatical
agreement between the plural subject and the singular verb. The ergative theory
should be rejected because it does not account for the wide use of תא in other
constructions in Biblical Hebrew.
10.3.1 With the Accusative
33 On the extensive Mishnaic usage, see M. H. Segal, A Grammar of Mishnaic
Hebrew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927) 42, 202.
34 See Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and
Related Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1976) 84–86. For related
arguments for Hebrew see Francis I. Andersen, “Passive and Ergative in Hebrew,”
Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. H. Goedicke
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1971) 1–15; and Khan, “Object Markers,”
496–97. On comparable developments in the preterite of Eastern Neo-Aramaic
dialects spoken in the same region as Persian and related languages, see G. Krotkoff,
A Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Kurdistan (American Oriental Series 64; New Haven,
Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 1982) 30–39, 52–55, 63; R. D. Hoberman,
The Syntax and Semantics of Verb Morphology in Modern Aramaic: A Jewish Dialect
of Iraqi Kurdistan (American Oriental Series 69; New Haven: American Oriental
Society, 1989) 95–105; cf. Daniel Boyarin’s comments in his review of Yona Sabar’s
pešaṭ Wayehi Bešallaḥ in Maarav 3 (1982) 99–114, esp. 103–6.