PHILOLOGY TO THE TRUTH OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 211 



merely the it of the nominative of the biiiteral noun. To explain 

 this : only one other Semitic language, Ethiopic, has developed 

 this form in the Lamedh-vowel verbs, cf. "'^ii, hd-nui, " built." 



T 



This form, accordingly, served as a model for a passive participle 

 of the first form of the verb in Hebrew and Ethiopic, but the 

 it in it was just the old nominative tl with the pronominal i suf- 

 fix. The real passive had lain in the first syllable in which d 

 had in course of time become treated as tone-long. Hebrew, 

 therefore, never lost a first-form passive in u, as has been 

 assumed by Hebraists, because it never developed one, and the 

 forms of passive participle in u of biiiteral verbs were a later 

 development on the analogy of hd-niii, qd-till. But in many cases 

 the old passive in i is in the written text, kethibh as it is called, 

 the later u being recommended to be read. The real u active of 

 the old biiiteral stem was preserved in the 6 of the active form 

 of the participle H^i!!, 5o-neh and this 6 = au active. Here, too, 



Hebrew has preserved the more ancient sounds. The old 

 passive of Hebrew and every other Semitic-Indo-European 

 verbal noun was in ai. 



Now when our passage, " And she bare Cain, and said, I have 

 gotten a man, even Jehovah," is more narrowly scrutinized, we 

 see that the writer has no doubt about the connection between 

 pp, qai7i, and ^il'^^p, qd-ni-thi. This suggests to us, we have 



already noted the possibility, that the verbal noun qd-ndh was 

 at the time of the writer (and I wish to emphasize this in the 

 name of science, because any indication of the writer's opinion 

 is extremely valuable, he being a contemporary witness) at the 

 stage of being passive in meaning, and the i at the end of the 

 stem may, to him, have marked the transference of the passive i, 

 represented in Cain to the end of the stem. In this case, the 

 original pronunciation would have been qd-nai-thi, the Hebrew 

 unpointed text, ^jl'^^p, remaining unchanged. Compare Arabic 

 "^^^ ra-mai-tu, " I have thrown," ''"^ ga-zau-tu, "I have 



attacked," the latter representing the transference of the old 

 active, the former the old passive, to the end of the stem. 



The construction of the passive noun with the pronoun, 

 which constitutes the verb, now becomes plain, which literally 

 would be " gotten of me." Then TS^, 'dli, which is used before 



Cain and Jehovah, and which is just the old discarded feminine 

 ending of the pronoun hai-wath, Imi-woth, later hai-yath, hai- 

 yoth, yath occurring in Aramaic, iyya in Arabic, Hebrew 'eth 

 and oth, should in these early writings have its full deictic 



p 2 



