'מכנף הארץ זְמִרֹת שמענו': מסורות מתנגשות בלשון המקרא בראי הבלשנות ההיסטורית

The paper aims at tracing the linguistic history of the various derivatives of z-m-r—going back to three different Proto-Semitic roots (*z-m-r, *z-b-r, *ð-m-r) that fell together in Hebrew—paying special attention to the singular form zimra and the plural zemirot. The discussion illustrates how etymological analysis necessarily leads to a grammatical observation, namely, that the discrepancies in the vocalization of the singular vs. plural forms of the lexeme denoting “song, singing” point to a diachronic gap between two different phases of the language. This conclusion is corroborated by textual evidence culled from various non-Tiberian sources, which allows one to penetrate into older linguistic formations of the pertinent words. While the recent debate over diachronic (usually lexical) distinctions within Biblical Hebrew focuses mostly on the possibility of identifying early vs. late biblical texts, much less attention has been given to cases such as the one discussed in this paper. Our discussion reveals a diachronic grammatical gap between the consonantal text and the vocalization traditions, leading to the conclusion that the diachronic distinction is not limited to specific passages, but rather pervades throughout the entire MT in its present form. Thus, the combined testimony of both linguistic and textual information
demonstrates the potential contribution of historical linguistics to the clarification of perplexing irregularities in the grammar of Biblical Hebrew and to the historical study of the Hebrew Bible.