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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] The Name "Joseph"
  • Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 15:33:50 EST


Isaac Fried:
You wrote: “You may be deluding yourself in thinking that the name Joseph
is a
grammatically structured Hebrew word. It may well be that the initial YO in
this name is the YA in his father’s name and the YI in his grandfather’s
name, being all holly names. The fact that the bible in Genesis 30:23-24
gives two accounts or
justifications for the name is reason enough for caution.”
1. Why didn’t you reference the name “Judah”?
1. The approach that most people who participate on these threads about
the explicit puns on the names of Jacob’s sons is quite revealing.
(a) There seems to be little interest in analyzing the significance of
the puns that the text explicitly states. Yet that is of course exactly
what
I am doing.
(b) Rather, people keep trying to say that those explicit puns are not
the real story. Some people claim that the names of Jacob’s sons are not
reported accurately in the text. Others claim that the explicit puns that
are set
forth in the text are not what is important in analyzing the names.
1. Are you assuming that the Patriarchal narratives were composed,
and/or heavily edited, in the mid-1st millennium BCE? Do you have any
linguistic
support for such view? That is not my view of the case.
1. Even if the explicit puns on the name “Joseph” that are set forth
in the text are “wrong” (not my view), doesn’t it make sense for us to
analyze those “wrong” puns? Don’t such puns likely tell us a lot about
either
the author of the Patriarchal narratives (my view), or possibly about the
editor who put in those “wrong” puns (not my view)?
As we will see, if we take the two explicit puns on the name “Joseph” in
the text seriously, we will be able to figure out how all three Patriarchal
successions worked. So there is a big benefit to working our way through
the
explicit puns that are explicitly set forth in the text. And this huge
payoff
suggests that these puns are not “wrong”, but rather were planned from the
get-go by the author of the Patriarchal narratives.
1. I myself see a single author of the Patriarchal narratives, who
lived in the mid-14th century BCE, with there having been almost no editing
of
the substantive context of the storyline. Consequently, I take the puns on
the
names of Jacob’s sons much more seriously than most academic scholars do. I
myself think that these particular names were chosen precisely in order to
make these profound puns. I do not see the puns in the text as being the
product of a later editor who is trying to pull a fast one on us.
And even if you disagree with that, wouldn’t you nevertheless agree that it
makes sense for us to take a serious look at the explicit puns that are set
forth in the text? We’re likely to learn quite a lot from those explicit
puns, it seems to me.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois



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