[b-hebrew] War machines and missiles in 2 chronicles
Karl Randolph
kwrandolph at email.com
Sat Mar 6 01:42:25 EST 2004
Peter, Harold and others:
I should have looked up a thesaurus before making my question. Projectile is a fitting term.
$LX is in the root of sending out, and as a weapon would be that which is sent out, such as a projectile.
X$BNWT both from its context and root indicates that these are war machines, though it does not indicate what sort of machine.
While there are a lot of words where we still have only a general idea of what a term means, that is not an excuse to take only a general term, we should be as specific as we can. This is one of the complaints I have against most dictionaries, for when a generalized term is used, why not a more generalized term, why not a term so generalized that it is practically meaningless?
Though in this example, a generalized term does not make much difference, in other cases can lead to misunderstanding. And it makes it much harder to learn a language. At least I found it much harder to learn vocabulary when most terms are generalized terms, and it was hard to differentiate synonyms.
Karl W. Randolph.
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya.org>
> On 05/03/2004 15:18, Harold R. Holmyard III wrote:
>
> >
> >I replied,"That's not a good comparison. Tables have not changed that much
> >from ancient Israel. But there were no rockets or explosives back then."
> >
> >
>
> But lamps and torches have. (Remember that British and probably Kenyan
> English "torch" = American "flashlight".) So Chemorion does have a
> point, there are things mentioned in Bible translations which are
> probably very different in form from what the average reader understands
> them to be, although similar in function. Even so, I suspect that
> "missiles" is going too far.
>
>
> Agreed. The uncertainty is a good reason to choose a rather generic word.
>
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter at qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
--
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