[b-hebrew] Ktiva & Kria
belaga at math.u-strasbg.fr
belaga at math.u-strasbg.fr
Sat Nov 3 13:02:33 EST 2007
Dear Yitzhak,
(1) In my answer to Karl on November 2, I tell about other solutions
of this particular discrepancy, the one suggested by you in (1)
included. My interest was to give voice to a particular Rabbinical
tradition I have found other day fascinating. You will find in the
below page of researchers from Bar Ilan another case of Rabbinical
incursion into Mathematics:
http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/vayakhel/zag.html
The same people have published an article on similar cases in a
magazine on the History of Mathematics; the references could be found
on their personal sites.
(2) This opinion is not universally accepted.
(3) I will follow the references you suggest, thanks.
(4) The identification of letters of the Hebrew alphabet with numbers
is very old, going back to pre-Davidic period: just look at the series
of David's psalms which are alphabetic acrostics; by the way, the word
"acrostic" being of Greek origins, it does not mean that the Greeks
invented this poetical genre.
In any case, I will follow the references you suggest, too.
Thanks a lot,
Edward
> On Nov 2, 2007 5:22 AM, Edward Belaga wrote:> In my article "On The
> Rabbinical Exegesis of an Enhanced Biblical> Value of Pi" is
> presented and discussed a certain tradition of reading> into the
> discrepancy of Ktiva (written form of the Massoretic text)> and Kria
> (its reading tradition) of a verse from Tanakh.>> (Could be found
> in many places; in the HTML format, for example, on the site>>
> http://www.math.ubc.ca/people/faculty/israel/bpi/bpi.html>> an
> independent critical account in a mathematical magazine could be>
> found on the site>> www.m-a.org.uk/docs/library/2063.pdf)>> Does
> anybody know other cases of such reading leading to conclusions,>
> already published or eventual, of a universal cultural interest ?
> 1) A much more simpler solution is rounding off. If the measurement
> of thediameter was not exactly 10 arms but almost, say, around 9.6
> arms, thena rounded off diameter would still read 10 arms, but the
> rounded offcircumference would be 30.
> 2) In general, in cases of kativ and qari the qari likely represents
> a laterreading. That is, in some cases, the Hebrew of the Bible,
> perhaps becauseof shifting semantics and orthographies, was felt to
> be wrong -- but thescribes were unwilling to change the written
> text. They therefore read itdifferently according to their
> understanding even though it was written insome specific way.
> Alternatively, and maybe even more widespread, isthe use of kativ
> and qari to deal with alternate versions of the text. Thereading
> tradition having come from a slightly different version of the
> textthan the writing tradition that prevailed. For more about this
> you can readthe appropriate section in Emanuel Tov's "Introduction
> to TextualCriticism" (perhaps in English it is called "Textual
> Criticism of the OldTestament")
> 3) Maimon Cohen suggests that these are two allomorphs of the
> sameword, comparable to dɔg and dɔgɔ ("fish") or rɔ( and rɔ(ɔ
> ("evil") that wereused interchangeably, and possibly, in Second
> Temple period times, theshorter form became more acceptable.
> 4) The modern system of Gematria is based on the Greek system.
> Inall likelihood it dates from Greek and later times, as the name
> implies,and as the system needs the final version of the mncpk
> letters to denoteall numbers up to a 1000, and these developed only
> in the Second Templeperiod Aramaic script. An earlier system may
> have simply given the lettersnumbers from 1 to 22. You can read
> about this here:http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/SNHIG.htmland in
> the criticism (section B) of Bar Ilan's review
> here:http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~testsm/elior.html
> Yitzhak Sapir_______________________________________________b-hebrew
> mailing
> listb-hebrew at lists.ibiblio.orghttp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>
Edward G. Belaga
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Institut de Recherche en Mathématique Avancée
Universite Louis Pasteur
7, rue René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
tel.: 333 90 24 02 35, FAX: 333 90 24 03 28
e-mail : edward.belaga at math.u-strasbg.fr
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