Metaist

Maximum He HaShe'elah

Previously: Consecutive Mappiq He, Non-Consecutive Mappiq He

Harold Zazula asks: What is the largest number of He HaShe'elah (interrogative prefix) in a pasuk or parsha?

Both Harold and Wikipedia helpfully tell us that the vowel under an interrogative prefix is chataf patach.

First, let's see how many verses have more than two words that start with a He and a chataf patach:

from pathlib import Path
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

URL_SEFARIA = "https://www.sefaria.org/{book}.{chap}.{verse}"

print("| count | ref |")
print("|-------|-----|")
for path in sorted(Path(".").glob("*.xml")):
    # ignore extraneous files
    if ".DH" in path.name or "Index" in path.name:
        continue
    # load the xml file; require lxml library
    soup = BeautifulSoup(path.read_text(), features="xml")
    for verse in soup.find_all("v"):
        count = sum([
          1 if word.text.startswith("הֲ") else 0
          for word in verse.find_all("w")
        ])
        if count > 2:
            book = path.stem
            chap_num = verse.parent["n"]
            verse_num = verse["n"]
            ref = f"{book} {chap_num}:{verse_num}"
            url = URL_SEFARIA.format(book=book, chap=chap_num, verse=verse_num)
            print(f"|{count}|[{ref}]({url})|")
count ref
9 Daniel 5:19
4 Ecclesiastes 1:2
5 Isaiah 40:21
3 Isaiah 58:5
3 I Kings 20:33
3 II Kings 4:26
3 Psalms 94:9

Let's take a look at each of these results.

In our next experiments we can try out: