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From: Russell Hendel <rhendel@saber.towson.edu>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 21:31:46 -0500 (EST)
Subject: RE: Full Defective spellings

Ben Katz continues the thread on full-defective spellings in v33n68
He writes

>I believe Dr. Hendel's distinction is interesting but irrelevant.  No
>amount of cleverness can cover up the fact that Migdol (as is true of
>many other keri/ketive words; "havtze" in Bereshit comes to mind) is not
>a Hebrew word.

Excellent error. In fact without any cleverness you can simply open
up a Konkordance and see that MIGDOL does occur twice (Ez29:10 and
Ez30:6) Furthermore the word MIGDAL (With a Kamatz vs a cholam) occurs
about 2 dozen times.

In other words I reassert what I said originally---problems of
spelling only emerge if one does not check the facts.

>And despite Dr. Hendel's assertion, there are about 5
>thousand keri/ketiv variants in Tanach, NOT EVEN COUNTING "adonai" for
>"yhvh" and "yerushalayim" for "yerushlaim" (the latter of which only
>appears, I believe 4 times with the final "yod").

Another excellent error! Does Ben Katz really believe that
substituting adonai for the tetragrammaton(for reasons of respect)
is NOT a reasonable explanation.

To put it another way, Ben Katz has looked at 5000 spellings and
has made a determination that since HE can't explain SOME of them
THEREFORE NONE of them have any reason! Surely this is incorrect.

I would respectfully submit that we should start the discussion by
agreeing on WHICH cases (like adonai-tetragrammaton) have reasonable
explanations and which don't

Russell Jay Hendel; Phd ASA
Dept of Math; Towson Univ
Moderator Rashi is SImple
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