Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/387

 is, however, somewhat rare in poetry, and even in prose it is not invariably necessary but is restricted to those cases in which the accusative of the object is more closely determined by being a proper name, or by having the article, or by a following determinate genitive (hence also by the suffixes), or in some other way (see below, c), e.g.  and she bare ;,  God created  (but  );  and God made ;.

Rem. 1. The rare occurrence of the in poetic style (e.g. it never occurs in, , , , &c., though it is frequent in the late Psalms) may be explained from the fact that in this as in other respects (cf. ) poetry represents a somewhat more archaic stage of the language than prose. The need of some external means of indicating the accusative could only have been felt after the case-endings had become wholly extinct. Even then the would probably have been used at first to indicate only an object placed before the verb (when it followed, it was already sufficiently characterized by its position as depending on the verb), or proper names. Finally, however, the became so customary everywhere in prose, that even the pronominal object was expressed rather by  with suffixes than by verbal suffixes, even when none of the reasons mentioned under e can be assigned for it; cf. Giesebrecht in 1881, p. 258 ff., and the statistics of H. Petri, cited above at the head of § 58. Such examples as  in the Priestly Code, beside  7:5 in the Jahvist, are especially instructive.

2. As accusatives determined in other ways, we have in the first place to consider the collectives introduced by, without a following article or determinate genitive, inasmuch as the meaning of includes a determinative sense, cf. e.g., 30, 8:21, ,. is used absolutely in, cf. 39:23; similarly, is determinate of itself, since it always denotes a person, hence  e.g., , &c., but never  So also the relative  in the sense of eum qui or quem, &c., e.g. , or id quod, , &c. Cf. also such examples as, , where is equivalent to the circumstance, that, &c.—Elsewhere  stands before nouns which are determinate in sense, although the article is omitted, which according to  is very frequently the case in poetic or otherwise elevated style; thus , , 15,  (to distinguish the object from the subject); 50:4 (with the first of two accusatives, also for the sake of clearness); , ,  (where the  are to be regarded as a distinct class);