Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Rolf wrote:
> Let me make a bold claim of which I hope the list members will respond:
>
> (1) If we have not decided whether tense is grammaticalized in Biblical
> Hebrew or not, and have an opinion of the meaning of particular morphologic
> forms in relation to their grammaticalization or not, we are not able to
> convey the message of the Bible in a faithful way.

It depends on what you mean by "faithful."  If you mean "thoroughly
accurate conveyance of the shades of meaning of the original,"
then yes, I would agree.  If you mean "doing the very best we can
with what we have according to our current state of knowledge,"
then I would have to disagree.  While I disagree with their big-part-
first approach, I would not say that the discourse people are not
trying to convey the message in their translations in a "faithful"
way.  Is a sound theory of the syntax of the verbal forms at the
clause level necessary to convey the meaning "faithfully" in the
sense of "most accurately?"  Definitely, and IMO trying to build a
translation without such a sound theory is building on sand.
YMMV.

> (2) If we have not decided whether verb forms such as yiqtol and qatal have
> an uncancellable meaning or not, i.e. whether or not the context can change
> the aspect and/or tense of a particular form or not,  we are not able to
> convey the message of the Bible in a faithful way.

Same response.

> Our standpoint may in time prove to be wrong, but it is a point of
> reference by which others can evaluate our translation. If we don't have
> such a point of reference, we are either led by our gut feeling or we are
> parroting translations or commentaries made by others.  I appreciate both
> your discourse analysis and the system on which it is built,  but it tells
> me nothing ( or at least very little) about the tense or aspect I should
> choose in a translation of a poetic or prophetic text. So I need something
> more - a theory of the meaning of the morphologic forms in Hebrew.

Agreed.

> The evolutionary hypothesis of the survival of the fittest is truly a
> tautology: Who is the fittest? The one who survives! I would not equate
> discourse analysis with this hypothesis, but some parts of it surely is
> tautological, at least as far as the goal is to establish meaning. It was
> Harald Weinreich who in 1964 first introduced discourse analysis as a means
> to aquire the meaning of verbs. However, he himself admitted that his
> system was "unassailable" (not falsifyable or testable) ( H. Weinreich,
> 1970, "Tense and Time" in "Archivum Linguisticum 1 (New Series) p 40). W
> Schneider, 1974, "Grammatik des Biblischen Hebräisch" wrote a Hebrew
> Grammar on the basis of Weinreich's system, and A. Niccacci, 1986, "The
> Syntax of the Verb in classical Hebrew Prose" followed the same road.

This is a very good analogy.  Another that comes to my mind is the
idea that discourse attempts to build a skyscraper from the top
down, instead of laying the foundation first so there's something to
build on.


Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.