[b-hebrew] (MQ: "Deep Place"
Alan Wood
salad_wood at yahoo.com.au
Thu Jan 5 18:46:32 EST 2012
Dear Jim,
As I understand it, you are saying:
· A place called Hebron in Genesis is described using
(MQ.
· The place called Hebron in Judges and Samuel is
described using (LH or HR.
· Based on your reading, these descriptions are incompatible (i.e. ‘outside Genesis’, they are not used of the
same site).
· Alter suggests that Genesis is wrong in its
description.
· You postulate that Genesis is describing
a different place of a similar name.
· This is important to you because it fits with
your wider thought on reading the patriarchal narratives.
It’s good that you want to have a conversation. But you’re starting this one, so you
need to tell others what it’s about.
You actually put the question ‘Are Hebron and Hebron the
same Hebron?’ after 2,158 of the 3,388 words you’ve so far said on this subject,
and only in your third post. You were
clearly heading there all along, so it would have helped if you had asked it up front - at the very least, at the
end of the first post (after your first 930 words). It’s a lot easier to have a conversation if
you get to the point sooner.
By the way, you have left open some rhetorical holes, if not
logical ones. I haven't looked where you've looked, so I don’t know if Genesis
routinely uses geographical descriptors differently from the rest of the Tanakh,
or from the rest of the Torah itself. If it does, that
would account for your data as well as Alter’s explanation or yours does. You have said “*leaving Genesis aside for a moment*,
there is not a single place that the Bible describes as being both (MQ and
either (LH or HR.” That makes me wonder,
where else does (MQ appear in odd ways in
Genesis? What other geographical
descriptors are used strangely in Genesis?
Alan Wood
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