Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

  Dear Harold,
 
  I'm afraid that I may disappoint you, in that my view of the HB is strictly 
secular, and thus do not consider all historical information contained in it 
as fully valid as if it were inspired  or dictated by a super-natural source. 
Which, I hasten to add, does not make me a so called 'minimlist' whose 
position I reject on various grounds.
   From that point of viewt the verse you cited does not provide historical 
but theological information to the reader,  that is it attributes divine 
authority to the text. Interestingly, already in the eleventh century, in an 
intellectual and sociological environment that practically excluded secular 
approach to the HB, the famous commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra hinted that Moses 
could not have written the book of Deuteronomy; if memory serves he added the 
words "wehamevin yavin" - let he who understands, understand.
     I believe that all discussion on the timing of the writing of biblical 
books, other than diachronic, is speculative.
  To cite a possibility of  partially  different source to the former 
prophets:   
  "....J  continues into the narrative that is distributed through the books 
of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and the first two chapters of I Kings. P  
also ppears to me clearly to continue into the latter half of the book of 
Joshua...."
    (From the recent The Bible with Sources Revealed by Richard Elliot 
Friedman HarpeSanFransisco, p.6, He has an excellent introduction to the 
Doumentary Hypothesis and adds a few of his own.)
  Thus in addition to to his Dt1 and Dt2 (!),   J and  P which are much 
earlier , in many scholars view, are components of the  DH.
  Now, I have my own speculation as to when the latter was composed, but 
there is no need here to overburden  the patient electorns with another 
speculation.
 
   Uri
 
  

"Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com> wrote:
Dear Uri,

What would some say may not have been so? Are 
they saying that Deuteronomy was not written at 
one time and place? The Book of Deuteronomy says 
that it was.

Deut. 31:9 ¶ So Moses wrote down this law and 
gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who 
carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and 
to all the elders of Israel.


                
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From: Noam Eitan <bhebrew AT yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] WAV Conjunction
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Dear George,

 

Thank you for this explanation. If that is what ‘aspect’ is about, this is 
disappointing, because I learned this concept in high school, and while (of 
course) it is valid, it does not solve everything. If I understand your 
explanation correctly, IMHO Modern Hebrew makes ample use of aspects as well, 
i.e., giving the time from an inside perspective (really from the perspective 
of the subject of the sentence, not the speaker.) In English, when you want 
to conjugate ‘he says he is sorry’ in the past, you would say ‘he said he was 
sorry.’ In Modern Hebrew you would say literally ‘he said he IS sorry.’ Many 
Hebrew speakers speak English  like that, and I have always felt kind of 
apologetic about it, as if there is some basic deficiency in Hebrew. This 
difference also leads to a lot of futile discussions. But my understanding is 
that Hebrew conjugates the sentence NOT from the perspective of the speaker, 
like in English, but from the perspective of the subject of the sentence 
('camera
 angle'.) Even though that is not exactly what you said, it seems modern 
Hebrew is using aspects – or did I mess things up completely? Also, tenses in 
Hebrew, Modern and Biblical are not exactly what they mean in English, but I 
can’t exactly break it down (tenses often do not mean a lot more that the 
form of the verb in whatever tense, e.g., past, but not a lot about the time 
of the action, Hebrew is just not that specific – I hope this is not too 
vague. In other words, when medieval Jewish grammarians talk about past and 
future 'tenses', they don’t make a statement about BH having tenses like 
European languages) Coming from modern Hebrew, some of the controversies 
about BH grammar seem artificial to me and emanating from trying to 
understand the logic and grammar of BH in terms applicable to European 
languages. I can happily cruise through much of the Bible without feeling 
challenged by the grammar, it’s when I try to conceptualize it systemically 
in grammatical concepts that I
 encounter in English text books of BH that I feel despair. 

 

Noam Eitan, Brooklyn, NY


George Athas <gathas AT hotkey.net.au> wrote:
Hi Noam!
 
Aspect is basically about the speaker's perspective (ie, aspect) of the 
action. It takes in more information that just tense (timing). One way to put 
it is how the action is positioned in relation to the speaker. It allows you 
to answer the following questions:
 
- When did the action occur?
- Does the speaker convey a detailed or non-detailed view of the action?
- Does the speaker consider the action to be a background action or a 
foreground action?
 
You might like to think of aspect as providing you with a 'camera angle' on 
the actions, not just a chronology of them.
 
I hope that makes some sense.
 
Best regards,
 
GEORGE ATHAS
Lecturer in Biblical Languages
Southern Cross College
Sydney, Australia

 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Noam Eitan 
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org 
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] WAV Conjunction


Dear George,
 
Thanks for this summary. I have despaired of making sense of BH verbal 
system. There are places that tolerate the concept of past and future tenses, 
particularly narratives; in others, mostly in the prophets, when I try to 
play with switching verbs form past to future or infinitive and step back to 
get the feel of it, it looks like "anything goes", as long as you don't use 
the same conjugation repetitively (which would indicate emphasis.) The 
perfect/imperfect concept doesn't help me at all and I feel is foreign to BH. 
Can someone summarize for me the concept of "aspects" or refer me to an 
online source? I don't understand this concept - maybe that's where the money 
is -  Noam Eitan, Brooklyn, NY

George Athas <gathas AT hotkey.net.au> wrote:
Hi Chris!

As you've picked up, the WAW CONSECUTIVE is a very prickly subject in 
Biblical Hebrew. The problems do not all come down to the WAW CONSECUTIVE, 
though -- there are other peripheral issues involved.

Essentially, let me outline the old school of thought, and then outline some 
new currents.




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Brian:

By the time Wellhausen or whomever made the claim that the book of the law 
that was found in the temple was Deuteronomy, he was working on seven decades 
(assuming this was the 1870s) of development on what became known as the JEPD 
theory.

I don’t see how it is defendable that it was the book of Deuteronomy. Why not 
another book? Why a book at all, having the story of the book of the law 
being found a later gloss to authenticate a recent composition as ancient by 
the same authors who penned Deuteronomy in the fifth century BC? When one has 
taken the à priori decision that Tanakh as a historical document is less 
trustworthy than the admittedly untrustworthy Egyptian records, then anything 
goes.

I am one of those who reject the JEPD theory. I view it as hopelessly 
compromised by its theological presuppositions. I get an impression of more 
than a whiff of anti-Semitism in its treating of ancient Jewish credulity in 
believing the accuracy of Tanakh’s historical claims, and in their simplicity 
of calling God by one term only until fairly late in their history when 
disparate elements were fused together to make what we have today.

By the time of Wellhausen and his collegues, the rather open admission of 
evolutionary presuppositions of the early 1800s had been replaced by supposed 
lines of cultural and linguistic development (Gesenius was a major figure 
here), though still based on the same presuppositions.

Who doubts the historicity of Thucidites record of the Peloponesian Wars? 
There is no archeological evidence to back his record up. It is the only 
record of those wars that we have. He did not write it as a history, rather 
as an analysis of what went on in their heads as the various parties fought 
the war. Or how about Xenephon’s Anabasis? That was published as a rollicking 
good tale.

So, unless there is good evidence that the records are untrustworthy (such as 
the ancient Egyptian practice of rewriting history to aggrandize the present 
ruling pharaoh, internal inconsistancies and/or conflicting reports from 
other sources), I tend within reason to assume that ancient records are 
basically trustworthy. That includes Tanakh. Philosophical presuppositions 
are not a valid reason to reject the historicity of the documents.

Furthermore, I percieve a pattern of linguistic development consistent with 
the claimed dates.

Karl W. Randolph. 

----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Roberts <formoria AT carolina.rr.com>

> Absolutely not all agree with the Documentary Hypothesis.
> 
> I've always been puzzled by the identification by JEDP backers of the 
> book of Deuteronomy as the "book of the law" found in the temple 
> disrepair. It hinges such a tremendously significant portion of an 
> already extremely hypothetical theory on an offhand remark in the 
> account of Josiah's reforms. And it does so without providing any real 
> reason to make that leap. It's as though someone (Wellshausen or 
> whomever) saw the verse and theorized that this "book of the law" could 
> be the very book I'm reading. Well, yes it could, but let's see how he 
> got from hypothesis to conclusion without anything in between.
> 
> Can anyone offer any insight?
> 
> Best Salaams,
> 
> Brian Roberts
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, June 2, 2004, at 08:46  PM, George F. Somsel wrote:
> 
> > Harold,
> >
> > At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think Peter and Uri were
> > referring to JEDP and the Documentary Hypothesis.  According to this
> > Deuteronomy was "found" in the temple and was the impetus for the
> > Josianic reforms.  It was, shall I say, an "occassional piece", i.e.
> > written for the occassion.  The histories were then written upon the
> > program of Deuteronomy with the centralized sanctuary, etc.
> >
> > What some say may not have been so that Uri referenced is that not all
> > agree to the Documentary Hypothesis.
> >
> > As regards your "the Bible tells me so" approach --
> >
> > "Things are not always as they seem.
> > Skim milk oft masquerades as cream."
> >
> > gfsomsel
-- 
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