Variation in grammatical gender in biblical Hebrew - A study on the variable gender agreements of "derekh" ("way")

The first part of this article provides a review of the attestations of the noun "derekh" ("way") in the Hebrew Bible, offering a new classification according to grammatical gender. In the second part of the article, an explanation of the variation in the grammatical gender of "derekh" is proposed. The author suggests that neither chronological, poetic, semantic or syntactic factors can explain the variation in gender in a satisfactory manner; although such factors may be of some importance in specific cases, the underlying decisive clue can be found rather in morphological and phonological features of words syntactically dependent on "derekh".