הצורות "פעלהו, יפעלהו" והבעת הנושא הסתמי במגילת הסרכים

The forms יפעלהו, פעלהו (past or future with third person singular pronominal suffix) appear many times in the Manual of Discipline: in some of these cases their usual interpretation as third person singular involves syntactical anomalies, the foremost of them being the use of a third person singular to express impersonal subject; on the other hand, to consider these forms as third person plural written defectively without waw, contrasts with the known orthographic habits of the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As a matter of fact, we have in these cases plural forms, in which the u vowel of the personal suffix has caused the dissimilation of the u vowel of the verbal ending (—uhu = —ehu) a phonetic phenomenon already known from Samaritan Hebrew.