B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

It is certainly a reasonable and simple English paraphrasing of the Hebrew text, except that the word "land" is not to be found in the original. The difficulty in the translation is not only conceptual, but possibly stems also from the fact that the word רוה RAWAH, 'relieve, satisfy, gratify', does not have a good English counterpart.
Prov. 7:18 לכה נרווה דודים is translated by NIV as "Come, let’s drink deeply of love". KJV has it as "Come, let us take our fill of love".
People living in a dry climate have a different sense of RAWAH, then people leaving in a wet region.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

SteveMiller wrote:

kwrandolph wrote: One thing that stands out is that רוה and צמאה are not opposites, for the former is a concrete noun, while the latter abstract.

Thanks Karl. How did you determine that one is concrete and the other abstract?

This is from some unpublished research.

The question came up, why do some nouns have both masculine and feminine forms? Why the differences? Do they have meaning?

There appear to be more than one answer: (masculine listed first)

ª Individual item verses a group

• concrete vs. abstract

• specific vs. generality

• actor vs. action (be careful here, as sometimes the actor is an actress)

• adjective vs. abstract noun

In this verse it appears that we deal with the concrete vs. abstract.

Karl W. Randolph.