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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Dahood on `ecah, derek, mow$ab

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: jucci <eljucci AT unipv.it>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dahood on `ecah, derek, mow$ab
  • Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 04:31:48 -0700

On 02/10/2003 03:35, jucci wrote:

see also
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/biblst/DJACcurrres/WhatRemains.pdf
David J.A. Clines, What Remains of the Old Testament?Its Text and Language in a Postmodern Age
p. 18 B. The Language of the Hebrew Bible
p. 23 c. The Language of the Hebrew Bible in a Postmodern Age

At 14.42 01/10/03 -0400, you wrote:

>Why is it that Dahood's work on Psalms (Anchor, 1965!) is not impacting
>recent translations, commentaries, lexicons?


Elio Jucci

SETH - Semitica et Theologica
http://dobc.unipv.it/SETH/index.htm

"Ex magno amoris incendio tantus uirtutis decor in animo crescit ..."
(Richard Rolle, Incendium Amoris)

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This is an interesting paper. But in the first part there does seem to be one big assumption, that 2 Samuel 22 || Psalm 18 is a text "where the variants seem to be wholly or almost wholly due to the usual processes of scribal transmission." This is probably true of some of the variants e.g. the "was seen"/"flew" variant in v.11. But there is no argument at all to reject the alternative hypothesis, that most of these variants are due to deliberate editorial changes made when the psalm was incorporated into its current contexts. The DSS evidence reveals one more variant in v.49 (the one in v.48 is insignificant as a vowel mater is dropped), and the LXX evidence suggests simply that LXX L was translated carelessly or from a damaged text. And I assume that Clines has put his strongest examples in the main text. So the number of transmission variants worth considering falls from 177 to 2 - quite a significant improvement in the reliability of the text!

Clines' argument against Dahood is interesting, but it is not mine. Clines seems to say that if you find the text hard to understand you should emend it (and that in the post-modern world any emendation is valid), rather than seek a meaning from Ugaritic etc. My argument is that if you find the text hard to understand you should expect that, because it is from a remote language and culture, and you should use some imagination to understand it in terms of well-attested Hebrew vocabulary. Maybe that gets you only to the Masoretes' understanding of the text rather than the true original, although this is often confirmed by ancient versions, DSS commentaries etc, but in most cases there is insufficient evidence to do more than speculate that the text may have originally had a meaning different from that understood by the Masoretes.

Clines' article does give me the details of the James Barr book I was referring to: not so much "Semantics of Biblical Language" (1961), although this is also relevant, as "Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament" (1968) in which he explicitly engages with Dahood.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/






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