16,18 'ereş 'al tekassî dāmî
woal yehi māqóm lezasăqāti
O earth, cover not my blood,
And let its cry have no burial-place.
In their commentary to this verse, Driver-Gray saw that
the sense desiderated by māqôm was "grave," though in their
translation it is rendered "(resting) place." They comment: "let
his blood lie uncovered that its voice may not be gagged with the dust of the
grave." It is possible to provide a philological basis for simply
translating maqôm, "burial-place." The Hadad Inscription from
Zincirli reads in line 14: w [h]qmt nsb hdd zn wmqm pnmw br qrl,
"And I erected this statue of Hadad and the burial-place of Panamuwa, son
of QRL." Cooke briefly comments on this passage that mqm,
"place" was possibly like topos, "a burial-place" in Greek
inscriptions. He translates it, however, "place." A similar nuance
may be noticed in Eshmunazar, lines 3-4, wškb 'nk bhlt z wbqbr z bmqm
'š bnt, "And I am lying in this casket and in this grave, in a tomb
which I built." Though no scholar seems to have recognized this nuance of mqm
here, it seems imposed by its balance with hlt and qbr and
by its being the nearest object to bnt, which, to judge from the direct
objects of this verb in Hebrew, desiderates an object less amorphous than
generic "place." This conclusion is strongly seconded by Ezek 39,11,
Pettēn legôg māqôm (MT meqôm) šām qeber beyiśrā'el, "I
shall give to Gog a burial-place there, a grave in Israel." Though the precise
sense of Qoh 8,10 remains elusive, the proximity of qebûrim shows that māqôm
qādôs resembles the sense of Greek hagios topos, frequently used of
a grave of a martyr or of a monastery associated with it. Greek topos
alone signifies "grave" and is found in this sense in Mk 16,6. In
view of Old Testament and Semitic usage, it is difficult to understand why
Liddell-Scott should propose an emendation of topos to taphos in
this text. Latin locus, "burial-place" is very frequent in epitaphs. (Mitchell
Dahood, “Northwest Semitic Philology and Job,” in The Bible in Current
Catholic Thought, ed. John L. McKenzie [New York: Herder and Herder, 1962],
61-62)
This should be compared with passages in the Book of Mormon were "place" is used to denote where someone was buried (1 Nephi 16:34), where people died (Mosiah 9:4; Alma 14:9) and to denote the destination of the dead (1 Nephi 15:34-35; 2 Nephi 28:23; Jacob 6:3; Enos 1:27; Mosiah 26:22-24; Alma 5:24-25; 54:22).
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