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  • From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • To: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Definite Article 7:14
  • Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:54:24 -0400

David,

You recall "the definite pronoun" but without telling us what this "the" is, nor explaining to us what is this "the" pronouning for.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Jun 25, 2007, at 7:51 PM, David Kummerow wrote:


Subject:
Re: [b-hebrew] Definite Article 7:14
From:
Harold Holmyard <hholmyard3 AT earthlink.net>
Date:
Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:37:28 -0500
To:
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

To:
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org


Dear Joseph,
HH: "My argument was not that the generic use of the article was
exactly the same as the usage of it in Gen 14:13, but they are
similar. The one could lead to the other. I wrote to Joseph:

See the word "famine" in Isa 29:8. See how it is used with "silver"
in Gen 13:2, or with "crimson" in Isa 1:18, or with "blindness" in
Gen 19:11. In all these English would use "a/an" or nothing, not "the."

Or look at these cases below, all of which take the definite article
in Hebrew, but an indefinite article in English:

like the heart of a lion (2 Sam 17:10)

as a dog laps (Judges 7:5)

as one hunts a partridge (1 Sam 26:20)

as one rends a kid (Judges 14:6)

If Hebrew could consider all these cases, which are clearly
indefinite in English, as worthy of a definite article in a generic
sense,"


JW:
None of the above are clearly indefinite in English. I've seen
English translations with "the" for all but Judges 14:6. More
importantly, none even sound awkward with "the".

HH: Sorry, but they do sound somewhat awkward to me because English does
not usually use the generic definite article this way, preferring an
indefinite article.


I'm the same as Joseph, though: all apart from the last one sounds fine.


[snip]


HH: David Kummerow shared with some of us an article written by a man
named Ehrensvärd. It claimed to undermine the category of the definite
article that you don't like. I went through only about a dozen of his
examples. He was trying to undermine the force of 67 examples. Some
examples seemed implausible for the definite meaning that he tried to
attribute to them. The strongest case of implausibility for me was with
his example 11. This was the author's argument:

(11) He found him sitting under the oak tree [H)LH] (1 Kgs 13,14)
A known oak tree.

HH: In example 11, a prophet of God traveled from Judah to Bethel and
was heading back to Judah, The sons of a man show their father the road
that the man of God was taking back to Judah. The father followed the
prophet and found him sitting under "the oak tree." There was evidently
more than one road the man of God could have taken; otherwise the sons
would not have had to show their father the road. If the readers don't
even know the precise road, how can they know the well-known oak tree on
it?

David thought it was too presumptuous of me to draw such a conclusion on
the basis of my limited knowledge of the biblical situation, but the
case is so weak in example 11 that it loses credibility, and there are
several a bit like that. The reason I bring this author up is that he is
trying to shoot holes in an established grammatical category found in
numerous Hebrew grammars. It is related to several other categories of
usage of the Hebrew article that are similar but different from English
usage. These are grammarians from different centuries. It is not just
these grammarians, for the translators of the King James Version drew
similar conclusions back in the 1600's. And translators across a wide
spectrum of beliefs confirm the grammarians' judgment by likewise
translating with the indefinite article where the Hebrew has the
definite article.


OK. I accept that 1Kgs 13:14 is most probably as you outline. However,
this is an exception to the overwhelming majority. Most of the other
examples can be taken otherwise. For me, the number is simply too low to
establish an indefinite category for the definite pronoun. I accept that
this may not be accepted. But I suggest that if this is maintained, then
perhaps another name other than "definite article" should be used.

I've given thought a bit more to the generic use of the definite article
and I'm not entirely sure that the indefinite use you argue for could
have sprung from it as you suggested earlier. In a generic use, the
definite article does not refer to either a specific or known
individual, but to a category (member?). However, the indefinite
examples are all claimed to refer to specific unknown individuals. This
is quite different. The arguments of my previous post remain
substantively untreated. It remains to be demonstrated for me if the BH
"definite article" has in fact undergone semantic bleaching to the point
that it is rather a "marker of specificity" rather than a "marker of
definiteness". Some of these examples may perhaps be a move in this
direction. However, again, most need not be taken as indefinite --
despite what the grammars assert and what some translations have done.

Much the same point is made by Holmstedt (2006: 21-22) regarding some
aberrant uses of ’ăšer:

"What, then, do we do with these apparently aberrant examples? Since
they represent less than than one-fifth of one percent of the 5,500
’ăšer clauses in the Hebrew Bible, not including the 299 included
clauses from Ben Sira and Qumran, I suggest that we hesitate in
recognising them as part of the grammar of ancient Hebrew. It is
possible that they are grammatical, particularly if we subscribe to
Sapir's maxim that 'all grammars leak,' which suggests that there is
room at the edges of a language's grammar for strange, but grammatical,
constructions. However, given the extreme statistical rarity of examples
in which ’ăšer serves a non-nominalising role, I strongly prefer to
exclude altogether these examples from the grammar of Hebrew; while they
might have been interpretable (an open question for which we shall never
have an answer since we lack native speaker input), they are nonetheless
grammatically unacceptable.

"This should not be a troublesome conclusion, since if we believe
ancient Hebrew to be a real language, then we should expect to face
marginally acceptable and even outright ungrammatical examples in such a
large and varied corpus as the Hebrew Bible....We should neither be
surprised to find errors, nor should we attempt to include them in our
grammars as anything other than a footnote."

My feeling is that, mutatis mutandis, this is much the case with the
so-called indefinite use of the BH definite article.


Holmstedt, Robert D. 2006. “The Story of Ancient Hebrew ’ăšer.” Ancient
Near Eastern Studies 43: 7-26.

Regards,
David Kummerow.
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