some progress (Hebrew)

[cellio]

I'm reading torah in a couple weeks, so last week I started looking at the portion I'm doing. I was able to translate most of it without aid. That was a pleasant surprise (though it's also not a hard passage). There were a few verbs I didn't know (like "strip"), for which I do not feel in the least bad.

I noticed an unusual construction in this portion (Chukat, chamishi), and I wonder what it means. (I haven't gone looking for commentaries yet.) Generally in biblical Hebrew double-noun constructions (which probably have a formal grammatical name) are "noun [implied "of"] noun", like "b'nei Yisrael" = "children of Israel". Har Sinai (har = mountain) is where we received torah. The beit t'filah is the house (beit) of prayer (t'filah). And so on. So I was a little surprised to see the phrase "hor ha-har" (= Mount Hor, but literally Hor the mountain) used consistently in this passage. "Har Hor" might sound a little funny, but is it grammatically unsound in some way I don't understand? Is this kind of stylistic variation really all over the place but I'm only now noticing it?

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

One of the few things I recall of Hebrew grammar is that, in English, this preposition-less Hebrew possessive is called the "construct state". It looks very like a phenomenon that is quite common, perhaps characteristically so, in English: the appositive. That's where we say things like "space shuttle escape hatch release mechanism repair kit manual", where we string nouns together, all of which except the last are actually functioning as adjectives. Latin also has a similar construction, called the appositional genitive.