Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 11/10/2003 13:19, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Dear Peter:
>
> The question is not whether people have changed, but of the nature of 
> evidence. The latter is the philosophical difference.
>
> I personally believe that the 22 characters in ancient Hebrew represent the 
> original 22 consonental phonemes. I also believe that ancient Hebrew was very 
> conservative in not splitting those phonemes into separate phonemes until 
> relatively late, in contrast to cognate languages. I also believe, based on 
> internal evidence and literary styles, that when Moses “authored” Genesis, he 
> basically collected earlier documents, even antediluvian documents, written 
> with the original 22 character alphabet, to make one book.
>  
And, personally, I believe in one God... If that is the kind of creed or 
belief you are talking about, I'm not going to shake you with any 
arguments or evidence. I will just say that your creed seems a rather 
unusual one.

> Yet, I’ll have to acknowledge that my objection to translating (LMH as 
> “virgin” in Proverbs 30:19 is based on the expectation that people and nature 
> have not changed from then till now. As a father with three sons, I should 
> know something about the sex drive. Even about the sex act. As a man whose 
> wife left him so that he had to bring his sons up as a single father, I am 
> very conscious of the fact that I am a father. As a person who grew up in 
> forest and glen, swamp, mountain and desert, seaside yet in foreign countries 
> such that I had a fluent knowledge of two foreign languages before age 16, 
> whose family was of a scientific leaning such that his physicist grandfather 
> was given an academic defermant (he was a college teacher who had to carry 
> around a Manhattan Project draft card) from the Manhattan Project, I am 
> equally at home tracking a deer in the forest as with discussing philosophy 
> in German, whose dyslexia was a blessing in disguise in that it forces me 
> constantly to e
> valuate grammar, logic and meaning, whose interest in history is almost 
> insatiable, who became a bookworm as ours was the only family in neighborhood 
> and extended family who did not have a TV until after I was a teenager (even 
> now I still don’t like watching TV, I usually don’t even listen to radio), in 
> view of all of the above, I do not fit into a typical postmodernist 
> Westerner. In fact, I feel very much like a stranger in a strange land. Who 
> among our mailing list has read Tenakh 20 times in Hebrew?  I can’t prove 
> that I have, for I lost count close to two decades ago, but I now find it 
> easier to read it with pre-Galut-Babel glyphs and an unpointed text than when 
> using modern Aramaic square glyphs and all the points. The grammar and 
> meanings make more sense that way.
>  
Thanks for sharing your interesting background. I sympathise with you 
feeling like a stranger in a strange land. But in a way you are very 
postmodernist in believing what you believe without caring whether there 
is evidence or not. Perhaps I should let you believe it in peace. Well, 
I would if you didn't argue so fiercely with those who don't share your 
views.

> Getting back onto subject, I have yet to see any convincing data that 
> indicates that the present is the key to the past. Let me emphasize again, 
> the philosophical difference is whether or not the present is the key to the 
> past. I say “No” and I think you say “Yes”.
>  
OK, you are probably right. But I don't see what other key there is to 
the past, unless that past is a purely speculative reconstruction based 
on almost no evidence. Maybe that's true of all reconstructions of the 
past. But if so, don't we have to resign ourselves to "history is bunk"?

> Karl W. Randolph.
>
>  

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