Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/83

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I. The Common Accents.

Preliminary remark. The accents which are marked as prepositive stand to the right over or under the initial consonant of the word; those marked as postpositive, to the left over or under the last consonant. Consequently in both cases the tone-syllable must be ascertained independently of the accent (but cf. below, l).

 [f] A. Disjunctive Accents (Distinctivi or Domini).

^[1]

1. ( ־ֽ ) סִלּוּק Sillûq (end) always with the tone-syllable of the last word before Sôph pāsûq (׃), the verse-divider, e.g. הָאָֽרֶץ׃.

2. ( ־֑ ) אַתְנָח ʾAthnâḥ or אַתְנָֽחְתָּא ʾAthnaḥtā (rest), the principal divider within the verse.

3 a. ( ־֒ ) סְגֽוֹלְתָּא S^egôltā, postpositive, marks the fourth or fifth subordinate division, counting backwards from ʾAthnâḥ (e.g. Gn 1).

3 b. ( ־֓ ) שַׁלְשֶׁלֶת Šalšèleth (i.e. chain), as disjunctive, or Great Šalšèleth, distinguished by the following stroke^[2] from the conjunctive in the poetic accentuation, is used for

1. All the disjunctives occur in Is 39.—The earlier Jewish accentuologists already distinguish between מְלָכִים Reges and מְשָֽׁרְתִים servi. The division of the disjunctive accents into Imperatores, Reges, Duces, Comites, which became common amongst Christian grammarians, originated in the Scrutinium S. S. ex accentibus of Sam. Bohlius, Rostock, 1636, and, as the source of manifold confusion, had better be given up. The order of the accents in respect to their disjunctive power is shown in general by the above classification, following Wickes. In respect to the height of tone (in chanting) 1, 2, 5, 4, 8, which were low and long sustained notes, are to be distinguished from the high notes (7, 3^a, 6, 13, 9), and the highest (3^b, 11, 12, 10); cf. Wickes, ט׳ כ״א p. 12 ff.—The name טְעָמִים (later=accents in general) was originally restricted to the disjunctives, see Kahle, 1. c., p. 169.
2. This stroke is commonly confused with Paseq, which has the same form. But Pâsēq (= restraining, dividing, also incorrectly called P^esîq) is neither an independent accent, nor a constituent part of other accents, but is used as a mark for various purposes; see the Masoretic lists at the end of Baer’s editions, and Wickes, Accents of the Twenty-one Books, p. 120 ff., where Pâsēq is divided into distinctivum, emphaticum, homonymicum, and euphonicum. The conjecture of Olshausen (Lehrb., p. 86 f.), that Pâsēq served also to point out marginal glosses subsequently interpolated into the text, has been further developed by E. von Ortenberg, ‘Die Bedeutung des Paseq für Quellenscheidung in den BB. d. A.T.,’ in Progr. des Domgymn. zu Verden, 1887, and in the article, ‘Paseq u. Legarmeh,’ in ZAW. 1887, p. 301 ff. (but see Wickes, ibid. 1888, p. 149 ff.; also E. König, in the Ztschr. f. kirchl. Wiss. u. kirchl. Leben, 1889, parts 5 and 6; Maas, in Hebraica, v. 121 ff., viii. 89 ff.). Prätorius, ZDMG. 1899, p 683 ff., pointed out that Paseq (which is pre-masoretic and quite distinct from L^egarmēh) besides being a divider (used especially for the sake of greater clearness) also served as a sign of abbreviation. For further treatment of Paseq see H. Grimme, ‘Pasekstudien,’ in the Bibl. Ztschr., i. 337 ff., ii. 28 ff., and Psalmenprobleme, &c., Freiburg (Switzerland), 1902, p. 173, where it is argued that Paseq indicates variants in a difficult sentence; J. Kennedy, The Note-line in the Heb. Scriptures, Edinb. 1903, with an index of all the occurrences of Paseq, p. 117 ff. According to Kennedy the ‘note-line’, of which he distinguishes sixteen different kinds, is intended to draw attention to some peculiarity in the text; it existed long before the Masoretes, and was no longer understood by them. See, however, the reviews of E. König, Theol. stud. u. Krit., 1904, p. 448 ff., G. Beer, TLZ. 1905, no. 3, and esp. A. Klostermann, Theol. Lit.-blatt, 1904, no. 13, with whom Ginsburg agrees (Verhandlungen des Hamb. Or.-kongresses von 1902, Leiden, 1904, p. 210 ff.) in showing that the tradition with regard to the 479 or 480 uses of Paseq is by no means uniform. The purpose of Paseq is clearly recognizable in the five old rules:
   1. as a divider between identical letters at the end and beginning of two words;
   2. between identical or very similar words;
   3. between words which are absolutely contradictory (as God and evil-doer);
   4. between words which are liable to be wrongly connected;
   5. and lastly, between heterogeneous terms, as ‘Eleazar the High Priest, and Joshua’.
   But the assumption of a far-reaching critical importance in Paseq is at least doubtful.—Cf. also the important article by H. Fuchs, ‘Pesiq ein Glossenzeichen,’ in the Vierteljahrsschrift f. Bibelkunde, Aug. 1908, p. 1 ff. and p. 97 ff.