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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?

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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 15:17:05 -0500

Jack:

This is one of the subjects that we disagree on, where there is no
possibility of resolution to where we can come to an agreement.

First of all, there is as much _scientific_ evidence for evolution as there
is that a UFO crashed in Roswell in the late 40s. By “scientific”, I use the
definition given by the anti-Christian, pro-evolution biology professor I had
in college, and in the textbook he had us buy, written by Dr. George Gaylord
Simpson who was possibly the top expert in evolution at that time. Their
definition of science rules out science as the proper tool for the study of
past events. In other words, by their definitions of both science and
evolution, evolution, the study of past development, cannot be a scientific
theory. Neither can creationism be a scientific theory, and for the same
reasons. Both are religious beliefs, and I don’t want to argue religion on
this forum.

(I thought it was interesting that your site,
http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm , has an ancient Egyptian picture of a
sauropod included.)

Seeing as this is a subject where there is no possibility of resolution, I
see no use in arguing it on this forum, nor of censorship of those ideas with
which one disagrees.

Now back to topic.

How do we know which was the earliest written language? The evidence from
literary styles indicates that Moses redacted earlier documents, purportedly
going back to Adam. That is if he redacted them at all. He may have just
concatenated them. That is evidence, not proof, that Adam spoke Hebrew in the
Garden of Eden.

A legitimate question then arises, why are there no Hebrew inscriptions that
predate the tokens that you picture? A possible answer is that almost all
Hebrew, at least from the time of Noah to Moses, was written on perishable
materials, such as leather or wood, thus modern researchers are left with not
the oldest writing, but the oldest surviving writing. The documents that
Moses wrote were not monumental inscriptions, but portable documents to be
carried by nomads. Similarly, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would have carried
portable documents, not inscriptions. But this is an argument from silence,
which proves nothing either way.

A modern example of nomads carrying a small library is the prospectors of the
American West in the late 1800s. I was surprised to learn that most had two
or three books, usually consisting of the Bible, complete works of
Shakespeare, and maybe another book or two (which would put their literacy
rate above the average high school graduate today). Yet today, there is no
evidence of their libraries at their abandoned mines. Historical records
(lacking for the time of Abraham) fill in for the missing information. There
is no physical reason that would have prevented Abraham, a rich nomad, from
having a library as part of his baggage, as long as it was portable.

Karl W. Randolph.

> I don't want to be anything less than collegial, Karl, but I find
> this all very...uh....silly. There were a number of languages in
> existence before Hebrew emerged from the NW Semitic arena. God
> does not have a "language" but if you really want to be literal and
> fundamental, the only language God is reported to have written is
> Aramaic on a wall to tell a king that his butt was in a crack.
> But, of course, many would make the argument that God was around a
> long, long time (about 14 billion years) before Aramaic came about.
> Since the last common ancestor of all humans alive today lived in
> Africa about 200,000 years ago, most would see the "Garden of Eden"
> and Adam as metaphors. Metaphors do not author scripture.
>
> Jack Kilmon
> San Marcos, Texas
--
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