Rashi's Understanding of Hitpael

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Other Title
  • RASHIのヒトパエル動詞理解
  • RASHI ノ ヒトパエル ドウシ リカイ チュウセイ ノ セイショ カイシャク ト ヘブライゴ ブンポウ ノ モンダイ
  • A Medieval Conflict between Biblical Interpretation and Hebrew Grammar
  • 中世の聖書解釈とヘブライ語文法の問題

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In the middle ages, the great concern of the Jewish exegetes was to identify the plain sense of the text (peshat) as freed from the rabbinical hermeneutics of the Bible (derash). It was partly due to the rise of the schools of Hebrew grammarians in the ninth century, that was not unrelated to the science of Arabic language which had developed already among Muslim in the late Umayya and early Abbas period. In its effect, as seen in Ibn Ezra's Torah commentary, the wide respect for Hebrew grammar was soon rendered into the exegetical belief that the correct grammatical knowledge of Hebrew would lead people to sole peshat.<br>However, one should not forget that Hebrew grammar was still flexible in those days, as Hebrew itself was still a language of communication, and alive enough to tolerate different understandings in details. Therefore, the quest for peshat in the middle ages by no means signifies the process of unifying different understandings of the text according to a standard Hebrew grammar. On the contrary, the understanding of the plain sense of the biblical text was rather complicated than simplified to the extent of the interest in the grammar of Hebrew language.<br>The paper attempts to illustrate such a case through the understanding of Rashi regarding Hitpael in the contrast to that of Ibn Janah and Ibn Ezra. Those scholars of the Spanish school considered that Hitpael can be both transitive and intransitive, while Rashi rejected the view and insisted on interpreting Hitpael only in the intransitive sense even in the occurrences where the verb accompanies the direct object marker ('et). It seems to reflect Rashi's criticism to the attitude of those scientific grammarians that tends to blur a semantic uniquness of Hitpael from other transitive verb stems such as Qal, Piel, and Hiphil.

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