Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Paul,

The following is a post I sent you privately on 20/01/99 at 23:58. I think
it basically responds to you recent post. Sorry if it doesn't in any way.


Ian

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Dear Paul,

I think there is a basic difference in the use of a list between us. You
are in no way compelled to read material that you find only marginal to
your interests. You know what your interests are and you write to those
interests. Other people respond in the same manner. There should be no drop
of content that you're interested in, if you maintain your end of it. Talk
of monopolizing the list implies that people are somehow prevented from
communicating. There is nothing at all stopping you or anyone else from
posting on any relevant issues, except willpower.

My interests regard, amongst other things, the relationship between text
and context. A text like Daniel, much abused by many readers, gains an
enormous amount of significance when read in a context that seems to
justify its having been written. The modern analyses of that text have
pinpointed a date of writing so narrow (circa 165 BCE) that it can easily
be falsified, yet it seems extremely accurate. Most of chapter 11 falls
into place as a blow-by-blow description of events happening around the
Jews in the century before the text was written. The contextualisation
provides the central antagonist, Antiochus IV, and explains many of the
otherwise obscure content. Why did the little horn surplant the three? What
is the one time, two times and a half a time? These are all rendered
historical and simple in the context of the Hellenistic pollution of the
temple.

By putting up remarkably naive defences to things that are transparently
otherwise, all one is doing is making it harder to work out the contexts in
which such texts belong. It requires a lot of analysis. The Philistine
thing should merely be an indicator (as is the Hittite reference), not a
major battle. It loudly says that the texts involved were not written at
the time readers have assumed they were written. This is nothing new.
Daniel was clearly not written during the exile. Most, if not all, of
Isaiah was not written during the pre-exilic period. With two or three
differing accounts of the conquests of various Canaanite cities, we know
that these were merely collected long after the times and can't be said to
represent events that really happened.

This should lead to a wholesale reconsideration of the naive literalist
readings of these texts -- as has been done with Daniel. You'll say that
there is nothing wrong with a naive literalist reading of the text and I'll
respond in one sense you're right. Yet we are trying to read these texts in
a scholarly manner, to understand them as much as they can be understood,
which means that one cannot take for granted that the texts were written
with the sorts of considerations that we think underlie them.

>Ibanag Translation Project

I guess you are involved in this. Dealing with translation, you will know
that context is extremely important in the understanding of the
significance of texts and how to translate them. You will be more aware of
the special problems imposed by the Philipine context. Without knowing that
context, the translator won't be able to convey the significance of the
texts at hand, be they translated to the Philipine context or from it. If
the basic context assumptions used by translators of the OT/HB are not
correct, it will mean translation problems. There are translation problems
in the field of the Dead Sea Scrolls due to what I consider a wrong
contextualisation of the documents.

Without knowing the genre you are working with you will not understand the
text. If you don't deal with the register of a text you will misrepresent it.

Rolf Furuli has tried to deal with something that is not well understood in
the translation of Biblical Hebrew, the actual significance of verb aspect
as applied to ancient Hebrew. He is battling against an English speaking
world that generally doesn't understand its own grammar and syntax. (How
many people, when asked how many grammatical tenses in English, will answer
correctly, "only two"? How many people know what "tense" means?) His aim
seems to me to be to get at what was inherent in the writers' usage of verb
aspect. Admirable aim. Getting to know the means and methods of the writers
of the texts is what contextualisation is aimed at.

My field of interest is the DSS and, working with texts like 1 Enoch and
Jubilees, I have been forced to work with Genesis to find how it relates to
them and others (eg the Genesis Apocryphon). (As Deuteronomy was such an
important book to the writers of the DSS, I'm slowly coming to grips with
it as well.) In trying to work out how the DSS fit in the scheme of Hebrew
religious thought I have to consider many things including the use of the
solar calendar -- as seen in Gen7&8. 1 Enoch shows that the prior calendar
was 360 day based, but Enoch adjusts it to 364 days, basically the DSS
calendar, but this is the calendar of Ezekiel as well (the lunar calendar
is Pharisaic). The Enochic Astronomical Book seems to have been written
after mid 3rd century BCE and marks the change to the 364-day calendar and
seemingly dates the writing of the so-called Elohist flood narrative.
Vogues in the forms of referring to God is a study that also fascinates me:
the form el elyon seems to me to have been a 2nd/1st century form in all
datable texts (indicating that the Melchizedek passage is a late insert in
Gen14). Do a search for the usage of "Lord of Hosts" and you'll find no
usage in the Pentateuch, but heavy usage in the prophets with the noted
exceptions of Ezekiel and Daniel. I am brought back to the OT/HB time and
again with indications of things needing to be contextualised contrary to
current thought.

I probably haven't helped your problems in this post, but maybe I have
expressed some of my concerns. Nevertheless, you seemed not to have noticed
that I originally made a few relatively simple statements about assumptions
people were making in their analyses, which has elicited responses from
numerous people on the list. Would you have me not answer them?
(Incidentally, I did attempt to take some of the posts off-list, but they
didn't stop coming.)

I'm sorry you feel as you expressed in your post, Paul, and I hope you get
back to discussing what you want.


Yours,


Ian