Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Søren Holst <sh AT teol.ku.dk>]

That is indeed it!

Yigal Levin explained it to me yesterday off-list. I guiess I should have
forwarded the info.

thnaks everybody
Soren

> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra:  Shai Heijmans [SMTP:shaih AT post.tau.ac.il]
> Sendt:        28. januar 2003 01:39
> Til:  b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Emne: [b-hebrew] Re: ignorance
> 
> I know of such abbravation that has been coined by Ze'ev Ben-Hayyim in his
> works about the Samaritan Hebrew. There it means: "Ivrit Nusah Tveria"
> (=tibarian hebrew), and servers to differentiate between ayin-nun-shin
> which
> is "Ivrit Nusah Shomron" (=samaritan hebrew).
> Is it that? If not, send me a whole sentence.
> 
> Shai Heijmans
>From 06peterson AT cua.edu  Wed Jan 29 05:52:45 2003
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From: "Trevor & Julie Peterson" <06peterson AT cua.edu>
To: "'b-hebrew'" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Emendations, was: Deut 32:5 SHiCHeT
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:55:38 -0500
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Peter wrote:
>
> But you haven't dealt with the case I mentioned where you have a text in
> front of you which you have undertaken to translate, and you find a
> corruption there which you do not know how to correct, because we are
> lacking adequate contextual clues; you can make sense of the words, but
> they don't make sense in the context.

But how do you know that it's a corruption? This is my point. There are only
a limited number of clues to suggest that a text is corrupt. One is that you
find variant readings. Another is that there seems to be an obvious spelling
error or some such thing. But to get to that, you have to see something that
doesn't make sense about the grammar. If you can make sense of the grammar
(as was the case in the original example), then what reason do you have to
think that the text is corrupt? In the example you give, I would suspect
that there's a problem somewhere. But I couldn't say it was necessarily a
textual corruption, because it seems just as likely to be a lack of
understanding on my part. (And in this case, the latter might be right,
since it could be a reference to the JFK speech.) All I'm saying--all I've
been trying to say in this whole discussion--is that it doesn't add up that
someone would say a text is probably corrupt (but give no specifics to show
that) and then assert that it makes sense as it stands. I can accept a
person saying a text is probably corrupt and doesn't make sense, but giving
the best translation possible even so. But if the text really makes sense,
then why think it's corrupt? Because some ancient versions seem to have
struggled with the meaning? What does that tell us, except that it's poetry,
and they don't seem to have got it?

> This may be rare, but it does
> happen, in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere (including in MS Word
> corrected documents which have meaningful words which often don't make
> sense in context, and you can't always tell what was originally
> intended).

In the vast majority of cases, I can tell what was supposed to be there when
MS-Word "corrects" a reading. The reason is that I know how MS-Word
"thinks." I know that it's always going to try to find a word that looks
close to the one in the text. As I say, there's no conceivable situation in
which "I am a jelly donut" could arise this way in English.

> What do you do? I still think that you should translate what
> is in front of you with a note "this is what was written, but was
> probably not intended", or simply "(sic)".

Fine. Just don't say that it makes sense the way it is :-)

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics