no evidence of maqaf in L in Gen 1:8

[Ben Denckla]

@99asteroids wrote:

Quote

Verse 8.

If there's a maqqeph, it's microscopic. Maybe the editions are just assuming it's there because it's supposed to be there. 

 

Good point. Again, it raises the questions:

• When to be charitable to the scribe?
• When charitable:
  • When to note that we're being charitable?
  • When to be silently charitable, i.e. without a note?

(And again, I think we are dealing with one of the many, many re-inked sections of manuscript L. BTW I have heard, from Nehemia Gordon, that there is a pattern for which pages needed more re-inking because the two sides of a piece of vellum have different ink-absorption "success" over time. BTW even modern printer paper (mostly? always?) has different properties on its two different sides, with one side preferred. Not sure about the paper used in modern books.)

 

Maqaf is a little like rafeh. It sort of means "this scroll-word left intentionally blank [i.e. devoid of an accent]." Which implies that this scroll-word should be smooshed into the next scroll-word to form a single chanted-word. (The process may have to be repeated in the case of maqaf compounds with more than two parts!)

 

But maqaf has had a very different fate than rafeh in the age of printing. Whereas

• rafeh is rarely used in printing, usually relegated to cases where one would expect a dagesh ...
• maqaf was retained completely.

Still, it is perhaps a provocative thought experiment:

• Just as nobody, to my knowledge, would bother to note a missing rafeh in a manuscript ...
• Is there an argument that you shouldn't bother to note it when you silently supply a missing maqaf during transcription?

Another thing this word brings to mind (though probably hundreds of thousands are like it in this respect): aren't we charitable all the time, with respect to word divisions? The re-inked text is either completely ambiguous or, if anything, suggests, via its spacing, that the letters should be divided ויה יבקר not ויהי בקר. But surely even to note that, much less reflect it in our body text, would be a case of overzealous, non-charitable-to-a-fault literalism, no?

Edited May 16 by Ben Denckla

[99asteroids]

I’m learning so much from you, Ben. This is great. Thank you. 

[Ben Denckla]

BTW it is perhaps only with little bit of wishful thinking that we can see a ḥolam dot in that mess near the top right of the qof. I mean, there's certainly some ink there, right where we would expect ink for a ḥolam dot, at least with respect to the locations of the (re-inked) letters. But there's a lot of ink there in the vicinity that we are happy to just call a mess and not transcribe as anything. Or, maybe we're not happy to ignore all that ink-remains, but we need to ignore all that ink-remains, whether we're happy about it or not. So it is a little suspicious that we choose to NOT ignore what might be a bit of ink-remains, if it conforms to our expectation of what intentional marks "should" be there.

Edited May 16 by Ben Denckla

[Ben Denckla]

21 hours ago, Ben Denckla said:

Maqaf [...] sort of means "this scroll-word left intentionally blank [i.e. devoid of an accent]."

 

Luckily, I conditioned my definition of maqaf with a "sort of," since, as usual, there are exceptions. Two types of exceptions that I'm aware of (there may well be more) are the following.

 

One of the two exceptions concerns certain two-part accents like metigah-zaqef. These are accent-pairs that always (or almost always?) appear on the same chanted word. We can handle those cases by adding the qualifier "primary" to our definition of maqaf, like this: "this scroll-word left intentionally blank [i.e. devoid of a primary accent]."

 

The other of the two exceptions concerns rare cases where maqaf connects two words that don't need to be connected, because the first word has a primary (albeit conjunctive) accent like merkha or munaḥ. Examples include the following (perhaps not coincidentally, MAM's documentation reveals that each of these has witnesses without the maqaf in question, i.e. this maqaf is contentious):

• Isaiah 40:7
• Isaiah 66:8
• Ezeqiel 16:12

But the case at hand, ויהי בקר in Gen 1:8, is a plain old case where a scroll-word has no accent, primary or otherwise. (It merely has a gaʿya, which we do not consider an accent. Manuscript L is notoriously unconcerned to distinguish gaʿya from merkha but let's assume it is gaʿya.) So, all of what I say here is not relevant to the case at hand. I just wanted to follow-up on my "sort of," for completeness.

 

(BTW in case it is not clear, I use the word "scroll-word" to mean "word in the sense fitting to an unpointed scroll." I sometimes also refer to a scroll-word as an "atom," using a kind of chemical analogy, since we already use "compound" in the term "maqaf compound." Just as in chemistry, atoms can exist on their own or as part of compounds.)

[miketisdell]

23 hours ago, Ben Denckla said:

@99asteroids wrote:

 

Good point. Again, it raises the questions:

• When to be charitable to the scribe?
• When charitable:
  • When to note that we're being charitable?
  • When to be silently charitable, i.e. without a note?

(And again, I think we are dealing with one of the many, many re-inked sections of manuscript L. BTW I have heard, from Nehemia Gordon, that there is a pattern for which pages needed more re-inking because the two sides of a piece of vellum have different ink-absorption "success" over time. BTW even modern printer paper (mostly? always?) has different properties on its two different sides, with one side preferred. Not sure about the paper used in modern books.)

 

Maqaf is a little like rafeh. It sort of means "this scroll-word left intentionally blank [i.e. devoid of an accent]." Which implies that this scroll-word should be smooshed into the next scroll-word to form a single chanted-word. (The process may have to be repeated in the case of maqaf compounds with more than two parts!)

 

But maqaf has had a very different fate than rafeh in the age of printing. Whereas

• rafeh is rarely used in printing, usually relegated to cases where one would expect a dagesh ...
• maqaf was retained completely.

Still, it is perhaps a provocative thought experiment:

• Just as nobody, to my knowledge, would bother to note a missing rafeh in a manuscript ...
• Is there an argument that you shouldn't bother to note it when you silently supply a missing maqaf during transcription?

Another thing this word brings to mind (though probably hundreds of thousands are like it in this respect): aren't we charitable all the time, with respect to word divisions? The re-inked text is either completely ambiguous or, if anything, suggests, via its spacing, that the letters should be divided ויה יבקר not ויהי בקר. But surely even to note that, much less reflect it in our body text, would be a case of overzealous, non-charitable-to-a-fault literalism, no?

It appears that the maqaf is there but was added after the fact i.e. as a correction. Note the marking above the letters right where the maqaf is expected. Note that we do see the maqef in the prior word pair. 

[Ben Denckla]

20 minutes ago, miketisdell said:

It appears that the maqaf is there but was added after the fact i.e. as a correction. Note the marking above the letters right where the maqaf is expected. Note that we do see the maqef in the prior word pair. 

 

You mean you're considering the ink-remains circled in blue below to be the maqaf mark? Could be, I suppose.

 

 

BTW I'm not sure what you mean by "after the fact." The common understanding is that all maqaf marks were added "after the fact" in the sense of "after the letters." For one thing, that's why so many maqaf marks are so short and hard to see: the letter-scribe (sometimes a different person than the pointing-scribe) didn't always leave space in a way that made the pointing-scribe's job easy!

 

So yes, perhaps in this case the pointing-scribe declined to even try to fit a maqaf in between the yod and the bet and instead floated something like a maqaf up near the upper-right corner of the bet. Unclear why, if that's what was going on, he didn't center it between the yod and the bet though.

 

I think it is more likely that what we're seeing there is the remains of the original bet, not a maqaf. I'm assuming that the bet we see today was re-inked over an original bet. Or, if not re-inked, perhaps it was written over an erasure of who-knows-what letter. The re-inking (or writing over an erasure) of course complicates the whole question of what "after the fact" means, BTW.

Edited May 17 by Ben Denckla