יָלַד

The Hebrew word for a female giving birth is יָלְדָה. But, what about for a male giving birth? Sometimes, the word used is יָלַד meaning to have a kid. Sometimes though, the word הוֹלִיד is used meaning to cause to give birth in that the male causes the female to have the child. All in all, the form יָלַד appears 11 times, all of which are in JE. The form הוֹלִיד appears 62 times, 61 times in P and once in D. I am excluding verses that are of neither form, such as those in the nifal form. The complete list of the form יָלַד in JE is as follows

Gen (4:18 x 3) (10:8) (10:13) (10:15) (10:24 x 2) (10:26) (22:23) (25:3)

The complete list of the הוֹלִיד form in P is as follows:

Gen 5 (27 times) Gen (6:10) (11:10-27 27 times) (17:20) (25:19) (48:6)
Lev. (25:45)
Nu. (26:29) (26:58)

The הוֹלִיד in D is in Deut 4:25.

How can this phenomenon be explained. One approach would be to argue for a difference between the forms to explain the variant usages. As with the case of Ani/Anoki form last week, such a distinction eludes me. As far as I can tell, the forms are used interchangeably. That being the case, the fact that the form used always aligns with the author according to the DH is striking. There are 2 outs here:
1. Cassuto argues that the DH assigns the author based on the form of the verb הוֹלִיד, hence the alignment of the two is not surprising. Cassuto’s premise is that the DH has no other basis other than the form of the word הוֹלִיד. Sometimes Cassuto might be right, but I think he’s wrong in most of the cases. I can’t consider every single case in one post, but as I go through the Pentateuch, I’ll be looking at this question. Another answer is coincidence. A coincidence happening 73 times seems highly unlikely, but if we posit that the choice of verb form is not made by each and every pasuk but by each and every passage, we only have 14 passages so coincidence is a possibility. Of course, the chance of getting 14 heads in a row is less than 1 in 10,000, but that is a bad analogy for reasons I hope to explore in future posts.