Is this just a peculiarity of the specific text, or does the disuse of "‑self" to indicate the reflexive here speak to broader trends?

In the 1917 JPS translation of the Hebrew Bible, we have, in Ecclesiastes 2:

I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and parks, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruit; I made me pools of water, to water therefrom the wood springing up with trees;

This was incredibly weird to me when I first read it.

For one thing, the preterite inflection for "to build" has always been "built" for me. This, however, I resolved somewhat when I saw this answer and tried running searches for the website the poster linked to for "builded".

More importantly, it was bizarre that "me" was used over "myself", when the constructions here take on a reflexive form. I've also seen this happen in an earlier chapter of this translation, in 1 Kings 19:6:

And he looked, and, behold, there was at his head a cake baked on the hot stones, and a cruse of water. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again.

Here, the antecedent to "him" is clearly Elijah, who is also the antecedent to "he". This was even weirder to me than the "me" case in Ecclesiastes, since with the third-person, context is absolutely necessary to determine whether "him" is the same person as "he", whereas no such issue comes up with "himself".

What's with the disuse of "‑self" here? Is this some sort of a tendency in the style of religious texts that is also seen elsewhere, and if so, why is there a disjoint between this sort of wording and contemporary usage and style? (The Wikisource KJV upload has similar language for Ecclesiastes.) Perhaps this is something that was common in much older English (whose style might have still been kept for "newer" Bible translations)? Does this lack of usage speak to broader trends in English grammar?

Solution 1:

I think it is a peculiarity of the text that is because they were following the grammatical peculiarities of the original language, where the reflexive is not used for such constructions. In Hebrew it was something like the following:

I-made-great my-works. I-built for-me houses. I-planted for-me vineyards. I-made for-me orchards and-gardens and-I-planted in-them [a] tree-of all-[kinds]-of fruit. I-made for-me pools-of water for-watering from-them [the]-forest that sprout trees.

In other words, Hebrew does not use a separate morphological form for first person pronouns that are indirect objects of the verb, unlike English. It is also a curiosity (to me at least) that we do that in English.