[b-hebrew] repost of question after reasearch
Harold Holmyard
hholmyard3 at earthlink.net
Wed May 7 15:15:54 EDT 2008
Dirk,
> To all,
>
> Thank you for all your responses on this mailing list. I has been a while since my last post. Work has been very busy lately. However, I have been looking through many more references.
>
> After the last series of responses regarding Daniel 9:2, I thought it would be helpful to get additional thoughts from other scholars on this subject. Since I do not have a background in Biblical Hebrew, it was implied by some that my concerns should be dismissed without a detailed answer. I have received many responses offline, to which I am very grateful.
>
> Since this is a Hebrew grammar mailing list and my original question was regarding the Hebrew of Daniel 9:2, I thought it would be constructive to come back to the mailing list, present some of my findings, and get further responses.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> In a previous post, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> "However, the Chronicler who lived after the exile, and Daniel, who lived at the end of the 70 years explicitly say that the 70 years referred to the period when Jesusalem was desolate. This may be because they had another text of Jeremiah or because they empirically knew the length of the period. In any case, a fine way of understanding ancient texts is to interpret the unclear passages in light of the clear ones, and not to reject the clear ones because of a certain theology or chronology."
>
> The book Rolf Furuli mentioned previously in his posts (his book, copyright 2003) was titled: PERSIAN CHRONOLOGY AND THE LENGTH OF THE BABYLONIAN EXILE OF THE JEWS. He states this on page 76.
>
> "A fundamental principle of interpretation which is universally accepted, is to interpret an ambiguous passage in the light of an unambiguous passage. In our case we have two unambiguous passages, namely, Daniel 9:2 and 2 Chronicles 36:21, which apply the 70 years of the desolate condition to Jerusalem. To start with the seemingly ambiguous words of Jeremiah 25:10 is to turn the matter upside down, because the mentioned principle is abandoned."
>
> I agree with this principle. It makes a lot of sense. However, I am unsure that Daniel 9:2 is the clear and unambigious verse. Below is a quotation is from a Danish linguist, knowledgable in Biblical Hebrew, Kristen Jørgensen who was reviewing RF's translation of Daniel 9:2. You may read the full article here:
>
HH: What have you done with these other texts, that seem clear enough to me?
Zech. 1:12 Then the angel of the LORD said, “LORD Almighty, how long
will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns of Judah,
which you have been angry with these seventy years?”
Zech. 7:5 “Ask all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you
fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy
years, was it really for me that you fasted?
HH: Again, the prophecy in Jeremiah about babylon's rule
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
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