[b-hebrew] Isaiah 53
Harold R. Holmyard III
hholmyard at ont.com
Sat May 15 11:51:37 EDT 2004
Dear Rolf,
Perhaps you should give us a passage whose translation you don't
like, and we can look at it. Many English translations render
prophetic perfect verbs with English futures, so I am not sure what
you are criticizing.
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
>I would like to return to my question about the link between future
>reference and prophetic utterances. It seems to me that students of
>Hebrew have been chewing cud for a hundred and fifty years without
>asking whether this is good for their health, i.e. old views are
>repeated over and over again without anybody asking for evidence.
>
>Apart from messages of judgment referring to people living at the
>time, the message of a prophet usually relates to the future (but it
>can occasionally include past or present reference as well). In his
>"A Grammar of the Hebrew Language" of 1841, p 356, Samuel Lee wrote:
>"Another leading principle, by which the tenses are regulated, has
>arisen out of the circumstance, that the Hebrews, in common with
>some other nations of the East, often represent events, - of the
>future occurrence of which they have no doubt, - as having already
>taken place. " How did he know? Because the Persians did the same!
>(BTW: Lee was a fine grammarian)
>
>The notion of "prophetic perfect" has been repeated over and over
>again, but I am not aware of a single piece of evidence for its
>correctness that ever has been produced from one of the documents of
>classical Hebrew. So I must ask again. If it looks like a duck,
>walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, should we not draw the
>conclusion that is *is* a duck. And similarly, if a prophet refers
>to the future, speaks about the future, and writes about the future,
>should we not give the verbs future reference when they are
>translated? Why in the world should we translate them by past or
>perfect?
>
>In my translation of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 into Norwegian, 41 of the
>finite verbs are translated with simple future, 7 with present, 1
>with simple past, and 2 with pluperfect. I simply do not understand
>the linguistic basis for the use past or perfect apart from the
>three metioned examples. In my doctoral thesis I have translated
>Jeremiah 50 and 51into English, and this is a *prophecy* about
>Babel. In the 104 verses I have translated, the following verbs are
>translated with simple future: 70 yiqtols, 2 weyiqtols, 7
>wayyiqtols, 49 weqatals, and 63 qatals. In addition 4 qatals are
>translated with future perfect. When I look at the renderings of
>modern Bible translations of these two chapters, I wonder what kind
>of logic is behind the back-and-forth, hither-and- tither use of
>English tenses. Can really and old obsolete rule have such a
>profound effect on modern translators?
>
>Would anyone who defend the idea of verbs with future reference
>being translated by past or perfect please step forward and give
>some *linguistic* evidence for this (not just references to
>grammars).
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