Biblical Grammar Enters the Culture Wars

In his new book, Hornkohl maintains that the Torah displays the earliest linguistic profile of any of the books of the Hebrew Bible and that this is evident in hundreds of places across its five books. One of his examples concerns the oddity Ms. Korach taught us in day school. It turns out that evidence from comparative Semitic linguistics and typological language patterns can explain how the feminine pronoun he, could come to have two spellings. But why only in the Torah? By the time the later books were written, only the familiar form for he (heh yod aleph) survived. And although these later scribes knew only that form of the word, they may have hesitated to “correct” what they perceived as an anomaly in the Torah because of the great reverence they held for it.