[b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin

Yitzhak Sapir yitzhaksapir at gmail.com
Sun Sep 25 05:33:04 EDT 2005


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir at gmail.com>
> >
> >   In fact, how do you know Onkelos wasn't given to Moses?
> > Where does the Onkelos say that it wasn't?  So if you go by
> > tradition for dating the Torah, you should go by tradition for the
> > Zohar and Onkelos too, and date them accordingly, and then
> > you have it -- complete and extensive religious texts from the time
> > of Moses in Aramaic.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > I haven't.  I relate to the Hebrew data the same way as
> > the statue -- the time it is dated.  The Massoretic data is
> > dated according to the date of the manuscript whether it
> > is the Leningrad Codex, or the Aleppo Codex.  The DSS
> > the same.  The statue the same.  All data on the same
> > grounds.  Like I said, by your method of dating,  you'd need
> > to consider Onkelos and the Zohar as originating in the
> > time of Moses.
> >
> Do you know how ridiculous this sounds?

No, I don't.  You keep telling me that my refusal to consider
the Torah as a 15th century document written in a 22 letter
script.  You know, many Rabbis would probably be open to
the idea that the Torah was originally given in "Proto-Sinaitic"
script and that the 22 letter script is later.  If the Torah could
be written in one script and changed to another script later,
why not do it twice?  But it is quite clear that traditionally
the view is held that not only the Torah was given on Mt.
Sinai, but also the entire vocalization information.  You
accept scholars who say that this can't be so because the
Massoretic Hebrew with vocalization is younger than the
Hebrew of the DSS, but you don't accept the same
scholars when they say that the Hebrew of the Bible is
also an evolved form of Hebrew from the 15th century.  No
belief of faith is ridiculous, so long as you remember it is
a belief of faith and not evidence in and of itself.  What is
ridiculous is when you are given evidence and believe that
you won't gain anything if you examine the evidence.  You
have come up with rather creative explanations for not
looking at the evidence in this entire exchange.  Along those
lines, you might want to look here:
http://biblical-studies.blogspot.com/2005/09/observation.html

And you didn't answer my question about why Ugaritic is
not "ancient Hebrew."  The main point of the question is
to force you to consider the different possibilities of
classification.

Yitzhak Sapir



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