A week or so ago, a thread by the semitist Ola Wikander caught my attention. In this short series of tweets, he made the case of how a rather common Hebrew verb, שָׁכַח šāḵaḥ, may, in fact not be used to mean ‘to forget,’ as that word usually does, in the fifth verse of Psalm 102. He makes the case for interpreting the verb as ‘to be withered’ or ‘to be shrivelled up from heat’ instead, which would, in my opinion, merit a new translation1 of the verse. The main argument which he adduces at the level of the verse’s context is that the surrounding verses also evoke the idea of a poor man suffering under inclement, extreme heat. It is furthermore relevant that he points out the existence of a verb in Ugaritic which, given its form and meaning, can reasonably be proposed as the cognate of the verb שָׁכַח šāḵaḥ with the meaning Ola Wikander himself believes to be applicable here.2 The pertinent tweets are presented to you right below this paragraph.3

Now we can take a close view at the whole verse itself, in which this שָׁכַח šāḵaḥ appears, a bit closer. The verse in question reads as follows in Hebrew:

הוּכָּה-כָעֵשֶׂב וַיִּבַשׁ לִבִּי:    כִּי-שָׁכַחְתִּי, מֵאֲכֹל לַחְמִי

The first part, up to the colon-like sign,4 may be unproblematically translated as

“Trampled upon like grass and dried out is my heart.”

After the “colon,” however, regularly used translations of the Hebrew Bible consistently take the verb שָׁכַח šāḵaḥ, which occurs there in the first person singular, שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî, to signify ‘forgetting.’ For example, on the Mechon Mamre website we find the following translation of the latter part:

“For I forget to eat my bread.”5

Now I would contend that at the syntactic level the part, or clause, מֵאֲכֹל לַחְמִי mē’ăḵōl laḥmî would complicate matters if one is to persist in reading שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî as “I forget,” “I have forgotten” (or any other form of the verb “to forget”), whereas Ola Wikander’s proposal, according to which שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî is to be interpreted as something in the vein of “I have become shrivelled up,” would combine better with that clause. The essential difference between the two verbs šāḵaḥ “to forget” and šāḵaḥ “to be shrivelled up, to be withered,” is that the former is a transitive verb which normally takes the “object forgotten” as the direct object, whilst the latter would be an intransitive, stative verb, indicating the state the subject (in this case, the speaker, the “I”) is finding himself in. שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî, if read as a form of “to forget,” would therefore take the clause מֵאֲכֹל לַחְמִי mē’ăḵōl laḥmî as its direct object. If we parse this clause, we see the following sequence:

1. the preposition min, which appears as mē on account of the next sound being a guttural (’), 2. the (construct) infinitive ’ăḵōl “to eat,” 3. laḥmî “my bread” or “my food,” which in its turn assumes the role of the direct object of the preceding infinitive ’ăḵōl.

The problematic element here is the preposition min, which often signifies movement from an object, and the following infinitive. When we go to the entry of the verb šāḵaḥ “to forget” in the very well-known Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon,6 we see that this is the only instance that the verb šāḵaḥ is found with its presumed object taking the preposition min. In order for this argument to gain more persuasiveness, it might be necessary to find out in which instances throughout the Biblical Hebrew corpus (apparent) transitive verbs (i.e. all those verbs, not just šāḵaḥ) take their objects with the preposition min and under what underlying circumstances (for instance, if it is more probable to see this min before a phrase, that is the given verb’s object, if that phrase consists of a construct infinitive, as would be the case, as per Brown-Driver-Briggs and others, in Psalms 102:5), but I would be very much surprised if one could find more than one or two more similar cases, and even in those cases there will probably be other ways to interpret the sentences or clauses than merely regarding it as a verb with a direct object that somehow unexpectedly has taken min before it.7 Long story short: The syntax seems “off” if one were to translate the verb šāḵaḥ here as “to forget,” and one wonders if the proposed alternative “to be shrivelled up” would fare any better syntactically.

On account of its proposed meaning, שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî as “I have become withered” or similar is, as mentioned earlier, a stative, intransitive verb. As such, the word or sets of words following that verb are highly likely to be an adverb or adverbial phrase which renders more information on the circumstances in which the speaker is withered, as the adverbs of adverbial phrases in English (put in italics below) do in below example sentences:

1. I have become withered yesterday.

2. I have become withered instantly.

3. I have become withered in Babylon.

4. I have become withered because of your enmity.

As is the case in English, and as demonstrated in above four example sentences, Biblical Hebrew can also make use of adverbs and, even more often, adverbial phrases, the latter of which usually begin with a preposition. The phrase that follows שָׁכַחְתִּי šāḵaḥtî, namely מֵאֲכֹל לַחְמִי mē’ăḵōl laḥmî, indeed begins with the preposition, i.e. the preposition min which has taken on the form mē here, and, as such, may very well function as an adverbial phrase following an intransitive stative verb.

We subsequently require to determine the probable meaning of the adverbial phrase at hand, which consists of the following: 1. the preposition min 2. the (construct) infinitive ’ăḵōl “to eat, eating” and 3. the noun with possessive pronoun (first person singular) suffix laḥmî “my bread, my food,” which clearly functions as the direct object of the aforementioned infinitive ’ăḵōl. The relationship between the elements 2 and 3 in this adverbial phrase can be considered obvious, but we do need to establish what the preposition min here, before an infinitive signifies.

After searching for some potential meanings of this min, whose basic meaning related to distance or removal (“from”) does not make much sense here, I found the most credible description of its actual meaning in this verse in the still quite reputable grammar by Gesenius.8 There we find in paragraph 133, subparagraph c, where it reads:

A somewhat different idea underlies the use of min after adjectives, or intransitive verbs possessing an attributive sense, when the thought to be expressed is that the quality is too little or too much in force for the attainment of a particular aim or object

Here the grammarian proceeds with quite numerous examples, but rather late in this subparagraph he proceeds to state the following:

This use is especially seen in the numerous instances in which the attribute is followed by min with an infinitive.9

Having taken all the above into consideration, I would finally propose the following translation of verse 5 of Psalm 102:

Trodden down like grass and dried out is my heart, for I have become too withered to even eat my bread.

(The added “even” is cannot be justified by referring to the Hebrew original, but I like it more if it’s present in the English translation).