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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] "Species" of the Genitive Waltke/O'Connor

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  • From: Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>
  • To: hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] "Species" of the Genitive Waltke/O'Connor
  • Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 06:35:58 -0400

C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

There must be a better way of teaching it. Students who end up asking the
question: Is this a "genitive of authorship" or a "genitive of source" have
fallen into a trap set for them by their instructors and their text books.
These are the same students who think that by identifying the mythical
semantic category of the genitive they have now obtained a key to exegesis
of the clause.

I think I'm going to have to agree with Harold on this one (even though that doesn't mean I'm disagreeing with much of your point in the process). I don't think there's anything wrong with identifying semantic possibilities per se. The classical model makes no attempt to account for how these possibilities arise--it's simply a catalog of what's there. To the extent that the "species" accurately reflect the meaning in their samples, there's nothing particularly misleading about pointing them out.

We might agree that the burden is on the teacher or writer to make sure new students understand what can and cannot be done with these categories. You can't prove an exegetical point, for instance, simply by saying, "This is a X genitive, so it means Y." That is, the categories are not proof of anything--they're simply suggestions, as Harold said, to keep before the mind of the reader what sorts of possibilities are available in a very general sense. It then remains to look at the specifics of the individual instance--the particular words used, the context, etc., to determine which of the possibilities might really work. It's something like the point of having numbered meanings in a dictionary. Not that I can arbitrarily pick whichever meaning suits my agenda and call it authoritative, but if I never knew that "bark" can mean a type of boat, I'm now in a better position to determine what the word might be doing in my particular instance than if I could only consider whether it might be the skin of a tree or the noise a dog makes.

I would gladly see more done in grammars to help people understand how the different meanings can be assessed. My point is simply that I don't think that has much to do with noting the range of possibilities associated with a syntactic construction.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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