Copulative-appositional lamed: A newly identified feature of (late) biblical hebrew

This paper identifies a hitherto unknown particle in Biblical Hebrew: the copulative-appositional lamed. This lamed denotes equality or equivalence between (1) a noun phrase and its appositional and attributive modifiers, and (2) a noun phrase and its nominal predicate. Secondarily, the particle also came to mark the last item in a list. The paper collects forty-five occurrences of the copulative-appositional lamed, which interestingly appear in texts from the sixth century BCE and in the pentateuchal source P. The paper then discusses the implications of these distribution patterns, and suggests several possible scenarios for the origin of the copulative-appositional lamed.