|
Ten Commandments
87
§ 17.
The commandment "Remember the
sabbath
day" (Exodus 20, 8) reads "Keep
the
sabbath day" in Deuteronomy 5, 12.
Why one
version has Zakhor
"remember" and the other
Shamor "keep"
is explained by post-Mosaical
changes in Hebrew phonology
and palaeography.49)
The
Mosaical text must have had Dhakhor
with
a voiced interdental sibilant as in
English "the"
spelled Tzadi at the
beginning, which changed
its pronunciation
to Zayin.50) The
original spelling
末末末末末末末末
must have accumulated as
case-law over some 400 years
of
legal history during the ancient
Republic of Israel (Ibid. p.
105).
The ownership of the Ba‘al
ha-Bayit or "master of the
house"
(Exodus 22, 7) is comparable
to the things and persons in
the
hand (manus) of the Roman
paterfamilias. A broad concept of
property
such as "any thing that is
thy neighbor's" has to be
a rather
late generalization.
49) Three centuries after Moses a
sound change occurred
(Judges 12, 6), in
which Hebrew and Aramaic lost the
"th"-sound,
so that words like "the thing"
would become "ze sing or shing"
in
Hebrew, and "de ting" in Aramaic. A
good example is Zakhor,
for the
Aramaic Torin and
Dikhrin (Ezra 7, 17) correspond
to
Hebrew Shewarim and
Zekharim. Hence the Mosaical
alphabet
had to have a special
letter for "th", that I spotted as
Tzadi,
cf. TORAH OF THE ALPHABET
(N. 1) p.73.
50) The Exodus version of the Ten Commandments
adjusted to the sound change with the new
phonetic spelling Zakhor, but
older
or more conservative manuscripts must
have retained the
original spelling
Tzakhor with an initial
Tzadi in analogy to
the
inconsistent orthography of Tzahov "golden"
and Zahav "gold"
for archaic Dhahab.
|
|
– 27 –
  
|
http://back.to/moses 
This site
in The Jewish
WebRing Exchange is owned
