Pronoun gender in consonantal Biblical Hebrew

[robrecht]

I think the question is best asked with respect to whether yod and waw are true consonents here or matres lectiomis, mothers of reading, which is my opinion based on very early Moabitic and Phoenician texts, where you certainly do find hu-aleph alone as the 3rd person masculine singular pronoun. We do not have early enough mss of the Bible to absolutely verify this. The oldest mss from Qumran generally exhibit a very liberal use of matres lectionis. Nonetheless, the verb declensions and liberal use of suffixes in Hebrew render the question moot in most every context I can imagine.

[John Reece]

I think the question is best asked with respect to whether yod and waw are true consonents here or matres lectiomis, mothers of reading, which is my opinion based on very early Moabitic and Phoenician texts, where you certainly do find hu-aleph alone as the 3rd person masculine singular pronoun. We do not have early enough mss of the Bible to absolutely verify this. The oldest mss from Qumran generally exhibit a very liberal use of matres lectionis. Nonetheless, the verb declensions and liberal use of suffixes in Hebrew render the question moot in most every context I can imagine.

I failed to include the following in my quote from Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley above, because it relates to a form that does not occur in extant texts of the Hebrew Bible.

Levy's explanation of this strange practice of the Masoretes is evidently right, viz, that originally ‏הא was written for both forms (...), and was almost everywhere, irrespective of gender, expanded into ‏הוא.

Thanks, Robrecht, for including that in your comment regarding consonants used as matres lectionis.*

*Wikipedia: In the spelling of Hebrew and some other Semitic languages, matres lectionis (Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: mater lectionis, Hebrew: אֵם קְרִיאָה mother of reading), refers to the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel. The letters that do this in Hebrew are א aleph, ה he, ו waw (or vav) and י yod (or yud). The yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.

[ZackMartin]

From Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar as edited and enlarged by the late E. Kautzsch, 2nd English edition revised in accordance with the twenty-eighth German edition (1909) by A. E. Cowley (1910), §32l:

The form ‏הוּא also stands in the consonantal text (Kᵉthibh) of the Pentateuch (with the exception of eleven places) for the feminine ‏הִיא. In all such cases the Masora, by the punctuation ‏הִוא, has indicated the Qᵉrê הִיא (Qᵉrê perpetuum, see §17*). The old explanation regarded this phenomenon as an archaism which was incorrectly removed by the Masoretes. This assumption is, however clearly untenable, if we consider (1) that no other Semitic language is without the quite indispensable distinction of gender in the separate pronoun of the 3rd person; (2) that this distinction does occur eleven times in the Pentateuch, and that in Gn 20:5, 38:25, Nu 5:13,14 ‏הִוא and ‏הִיא are found close to one another; (3) that outside the Pentateuch the distinction is found in the oldest documents, so that ‏הִוא cannot be regarded as adopted from the Aramaic; (4) that those parts of the book of Joshua which certainly formed a constituent part of the original sources of the Pentateuch, know nothing of this epicene use of ‏הוּא. Consequently there only remains the hypothesis that the writing of ‏הוא for ‏היא rests on an orthographical peculiarity which in some recension of the Pentateuch-text was almost consistently followed, but was afterward very properly rejected by the Masoretes. The orthography was, however peculiar to the Pentateuch-text alone, since it is unnecessary to follow the Masora in writing ‏‏הִיא for ‏הוּא in 1 K 17:15, Is 30:33, Jb 31:11, or ‏הוּא for ‏‏הִיא in Ps 73:16, Ec 5:8, 1 Ch 29:18.

*The margins of Biblical manuscripts and editions exhibits variants of an early date (...), called Qᵉrê to be read, since, according to the opinion of the Jewish critics, they are to be preferred to the Kᵉthibh, i.e., what is written in the text, and are actually to be read instead of it.

Do you think one explanation of this peculiarity might be that ‏היא and ‏הוא can look very similar, and it might be a common scribal error to confuse one for the other? I thought I read somewhere the mixing up yodh and vav is a common scribal error. Of course, as you've said elsewhere, the broader context (gender agreement with antecedent nouns, adjectives and verbs) will make it clear what gender meant in spite of this scribal error, so this is the kind of error that is easily fixed. So maybe, in the textual history of the MT, this scribal error crept into the text, and then the Masoretes have corrected it? Possibly those encountering the scribal error, might have mistakenly thought that it was an archaism rather than an error, and hence continued to copy it?

Another possibility is it is some kind of local dialectical variation, in which a ‏היא / ‏הוא merger occurred, and that perchance this local dialect has left its mark on the textual history of the Pentateuch. Since they sound rather similar anyway (just a difference in vowels), it's not inconceivable that in some dialect they were merged. Of course, I don't think we have any evidence of such a dialect ever existing, but is it inconceivable that such a dialect did once exist, but the only trace of it remaining is the text of the Pentateuch? With reference to "no other Semitic language is without the quite indispensable distinction of gender in the separate pronoun of the 3rd person" - distinctions in pronouns can be lost over time. Look at modern English, in which we have relatively recently lost the distinctions of number and case in the second person. I think it is a convincing argument that the merger of genders cannot be archaic, but at the same time, it is possible that such a merger happened in some since lost dialect.

I guess this is just one of those mysteries to which the answer will never be known for sure, not in this life anyway (barring any future major discoveries that might shed light on it.)

Zack

[EDIT: Actually, now that I think more about it, I think that the insertion of matres lectionis explanation mentioned by robrecht and John Reese above is the most likely explanation; more likely than either of my two hypothesises above.]