Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Isaiah 53

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Isaiah 53
  • Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 10:51:37 -0500

Dear Rolf,

Perhaps you should give us a passage whose translation you don't like, and we can look at it. Many English translations render prophetic perfect verbs with English futures, so I am not sure what you are criticizing.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard

I would like to return to my question about the link between future reference and prophetic utterances. It seems to me that students of Hebrew have been chewing cud for a hundred and fifty years without asking whether this is good for their health, i.e. old views are repeated over and over again without anybody asking for evidence.

Apart from messages of judgment referring to people living at the time, the message of a prophet usually relates to the future (but it can occasionally include past or present reference as well). In his "A Grammar of the Hebrew Language" of 1841, p 356, Samuel Lee wrote: "Another leading principle, by which the tenses are regulated, has arisen out of the circumstance, that the Hebrews, in common with some other nations of the East, often represent events, - of the future occurrence of which they have no doubt, - as having already taken place. " How did he know? Because the Persians did the same! (BTW: Lee was a fine grammarian)

The notion of "prophetic perfect" has been repeated over and over again, but I am not aware of a single piece of evidence for its correctness that ever has been produced from one of the documents of classical Hebrew. So I must ask again. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, should we not draw the conclusion that is *is* a duck. And similarly, if a prophet refers to the future, speaks about the future, and writes about the future, should we not give the verbs future reference when they are translated? Why in the world should we translate them by past or perfect?

In my translation of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 into Norwegian, 41 of the finite verbs are translated with simple future, 7 with present, 1 with simple past, and 2 with pluperfect. I simply do not understand the linguistic basis for the use past or perfect apart from the three metioned examples. In my doctoral thesis I have translated Jeremiah 50 and 51into English, and this is a *prophecy* about Babel. In the 104 verses I have translated, the following verbs are translated with simple future: 70 yiqtols, 2 weyiqtols, 7 wayyiqtols, 49 weqatals, and 63 qatals. In addition 4 qatals are translated with future perfect. When I look at the renderings of modern Bible translations of these two chapters, I wonder what kind of logic is behind the back-and-forth, hither-and- tither use of English tenses. Can really and old obsolete rule have such a profound effect on modern translators?

Would anyone who defend the idea of verbs with future reference being translated by past or perfect please step forward and give some *linguistic* evidence for this (not just references to grammars).




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page