Guest Blogger:Ari Kinsberg
MA, PharmD, RPh
Brooklyn, New York
Member of Google's Leining Group
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Introductory Principles
In the absence of punctuation in ancient Hebrew texts, trop assumed the role of dividing up sentences into syntactic units. This is often reflected in the pshat of the mefarshim, although not always (click here for a good example from Josh Waxman using parah adumah temimah).
There are two types of trop: conjunctive (mehaberim) and disjunctive (mafsikim). The disjunctive trop serve the purpose of dividing up each pasuk. The various disjunctive trop are divided into different classes, each of which produces a stronger division (or pause when reading). If I'm speaking gibberish, think of it this way: silluk (sof pasuk) is a period; etnahta is a semi-colon; segol, zakef and tipha are commas; etc. Note that this is important for ba'alei keri'ah, as they must be cognizant of the different levels of trop in order to know how to group words together and how long to pause between each group when leining.
In some instances, the stronger classes of disjunctive trop can alter the vocalization (nekudot) of a word in favor of longer or fuller vowels, often reflecting a pre-Biblical form of Hebrew vocalization. This generally happens with the silluk and etnahta, the strongest of the disjunctive trop, but can also appear occasionally with the weaker trop of zakef, and rarer yet with tipha.
Example: the general pronunciation of יאכלו is yo-khe-LU, but in the "pausal" form with a strong disjunctive trop it becomes yo-KHEI-lu (i.e., in this instance the sheva under the khaf becomes a tzere and the stress shifts from the last syllable to the second-to-last syllable, also known as the pre-tonic position). Compare Gen. 32.32 with Deut. 18:8. Another example is when pesach becomes pasach (i.e., the segol under the het reverts to kamatz).
Pesach vs. Pasach
The word pesah appears in the Bible as the name of a holiday forty-nine times. Generally it is vocalized with segol-patah, but in ten cases it appears with kamatz-patah. (Note that pesah is never spelled with a tzere, even though it is popularly pronounced as peisach.) In nine of these instances with kamatz-patah, the word is cantillated, as expected, with the strong disjunctive trop of silluk or etnahta. In one instance, however, the kamatz-patah appears with a tipha (Num. 9:2).
Looking at Num. 9:2, one is struck that the pasuk lacks an etnahta, which is generally the main pause. The tipha emerges as the most important disjunctive trop and a major pause in the pasuk, and hence the vocalization of the tipha word is altered in the manner normally reserved for when the word carries an etnahta.
Why No Etnahta in Num 9:2?
Now that we understand why pesah is vocalized with kamatz-patah even though it is "only" a tipha, the question remains of why there is no etnahta in this pasuk to being with. Why is it left for the tipha to serve as the strongest disjunctive trop? To answer this, it is necessary to review how a pasuk is divided up with the trop.
The main pausal word of a pasuk generally carries an etnahta as its trop, although on limited occasions it can be a tipha or a zakef.
In a sentence of only two or three words, it is always a tipha (e.g., Ex. 20:13).
In longer pesukim: if the main pause is on the word before the silluk, the disjunctive trop will generally be a tipha (e.g., Num. 9:1), although there can be an etnahta in a few instances to signify a strong syntactic break (e.g., Gen 1:3).
If the main pause is on the second word before the silluk, etnahta becomes more common as the main disjunctive trop (Gen. 1:17), although tipha is still possible (Ex. 15:18). On the third or fourth word before the silluk, the main disjunctive trop can be etnahta or zakef. The farther back in the pasuk that the major pause appears, the more likely there will be an etnahta. At five words before the silluk, there will almost always be an etnahta (with only four exceptions). If the pause is on the sixth word or beyond, there will always be an etnahta.
Efrayim vs. Efroyim
The week after shabbat be-ha'alotekha featured another interesting pausal form. In parshat shelah, the name ephraim with a tipha is vocalized with a kamatz (gadol) under the resh rather than the standard patah (13:8). (I was not sensitive to this particular example until recently because I don't distinguish between long kamatz and patah when leining).
Considering the entire pasuk, it becomes evident that in this instance the tipha is the major pausal trop in the absence of an etnahta (as in the pesah example), and thus the word that carries it shifts in accordance with the rules of major pausal forms (also see Hos. 4:17).
Tipha vs. Zakef
Each pasuk in the list of spies at the beginning of shelah (Num. 13:4-15) contains the same sequence of four words (ploni ben-ploni . . . le-mate) and the general trop pattern is munah-zakef tipha-silluk. In this regard the ephraim pasuk (verse 8) once again presents with a problem (see Dikdukian); while it contains the same four-word sequence as the rest of the list, the trop pattern is merkha-tipha munah-silluk. (Verse 11 has an altogether different pattern because it contains six words and is beyond our scope.)
The truth is that verse 8 should not bother us as the exception, but rather it should be the other pesukim that stand out. After all, while we learned above that the main pause is either an etnahta or a tipha, as in verse 8, neither is present in all the other verses in the list of spies. Instead a zakef serves as the most powerful disjunctive trop in those verses!
In fact, there is an exception to the general etnahta/tipha rule stated above when the main disjunctive trop that is expected is a tipha on the second word before the silluk. In situations where either the silluk word or the word that precedes it contains two or more syllables before its trop (or one long vowel followed by a meteg and any type of sheva), the tipha on the second word is replaced with a zakef.
And so it all comes together!
Well not really. There is still a problem with Num. 13:8, but I'm too tired to write about it now.
Postscript
Tanakh Simanim erroneously has a zakef on shelomo in II Chron. 1:18 instead of a revi'i. A zakef on shelomo in this instance would indicate that it is the dominant pausal trop; if it were indeed the dominant trop, however, it should have an etnahta, being that it is the sixth word before the silluk.
References
This post is based on the works of William Wickes, R. Mordechai Breuer and Michael Perlman.
Ari Kinsberg
MA, PharmD, RPh
Brooklyn, New York
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Shalom and Regards,
RRW
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