Semitic circumstantial qualifiers in the Book of Judges: A pilot study on the infinitive

Introduction It is commonly held that the frequent syntagm consisting of the infinitive construct with l mæd – the so-called liqt l – because of the prefixed preposition  has “a strong value for the direction, the aim, the purpose of an action”, as in Gen 31:19 “now Laban had gone to shear his sheep” (J-M § 124l). At the same time many grammars recognize that in the liqtol syntagm the preposition “often has a very weak meaning or even no meaning at all” (J-M, § 49f), and that the syntagm is also used to express adverbial ideas, as in Gen 18:19 !   " # “they shall keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justness” (J-M § 124o). Such an adverbial usage is sometimes described as equivalent to the Latin gerund (J-M § 124o). It might appear strange to consider an infinitive preceded by a preposition  “to, for” as a possible circumstantial qualifier, but the compound liqt l is generally recognized to be more closely integrated than the combination of other prepositions with the infinitive construct. Gesenius-Kautzsch § 45 f–g) describes how the infinitive construct with  forms “A kind of Gerund”, where the two morphemes have fused into “a single grammatical form”, cf. d g š lene in !  (Ps 118:13) with the absence of d g š in $ % (Job 4:13) and 2) $ & Sam 3:34). Since the morpheme  in many cases has practically “no meaning at all” the syntagm liqt l must “have been felt to constitute a closer unit”, as an infinitive in itself (J-M § 49 f). The usage of liqt l as infinitive must be very old, and is used as an infinitive side by side with qët l throughout Biblical Hebrew. It goes without saying that the adverbial functions of the Hebrew infinitive construct has a Semitic parallel in the Arabic mas dar used in the accusative: fadaÝawtuhu raÊ Þa Þan tak na tilka b “I invited him hoping that this would happen within me” (The S ra of Ibn IsÎ'q).1 In this example from one of our earliest texts in classical Arabic, the raÊ Þa is an infinitive with an accusative ending, formed from the verb raÊ (“hope, wait”). An infinitive in the accusative case efter the finite verb is a normal syntactic