Biblical Hebrew Forum

[moon AT mail.sogang.ac.kr]

Thanks, Peter. Please see my comments below.

Psalms 143:2a:
>> >>W:)aL_T.fBoW B:Mi$:P.f+ )eT_(aB:D.eKf C.iY Lo)_YiCD.aQ L:PfNeYKf KfL_XfY

[Peter]
> My own interpretation would be along the lines of "don't go with your 
> servant to (the place of) judgment", i.e. "don't take your servant to 
> court". Compare Isaiah 3:14, Job 22:4, the same idiom except with `IM 
> instead of 'ET, and Job 9:32. Compare also Jeremiah 1:16, 4:12, 12:1, 
> 39:5 where MISHPATIM 'ET- implies litigation against.
> 

[Moon] I would like to translate Isaiah 3:14 as follows: 

Isaiah 3:14: ADONAI B:Mi$:P.f+  YfBoW  (iM-CiQ:N"Y (fM.oW

The Lord with judgement will come against the elders of his people.  

Your second set of examples (Jer 1:16, 4:12, 12:1, 39:5) 
have to do with "Lord will tell judgement against you"

In these verses, IM-X, ET_X can be taken to mean
"with respect to X" and in the context of the above verses, "against X".

To me, "Lord going with his servant to a court" is strange, because
Lord himself is the judge. 

The reason why I quibble with the traditional translation "enter into 
judgement
with your servant" is that it treats "judgement with your servant" as 
a single constituent in the sentence. In Psalms 143:2a, B:Mi$:P.f+ 
)eT_(aB:D.eKf 
might be taken as a phrase, if we can combine the two words together as 
 B:Mi$:P.f+--eT_(aB:D.eKf. Then B: can govern the whole phrase. But as it is,
I wonder if this kind of parsing is legitimate.   

The word order of Isaiah 3:14 clearly shows that B:Mi$:P.f+ and (iM-CiQ:N"Y 
(fM.oW are two separate constituents. So, it is not legitimate to take the 
verse to 
mean "God will come into judgement-with-his-elders". Rather,  YfBoW  
(iM-CiQ:N"Y 
is naturally translated as "come unto the elders", and together with 
B:Mi$:P.f+, we have "Lord will come unto the elders with judgement" or
"Lord will come against the elders with judgement".

What do you think?

-----------------------------------
By the way, do you use a software to find parallels of a sentence or a phrase?

Because I am myself a computer scientist, I am very much interested in using
the best software for that purpose or making it sometime in the future. 
My current tool, Bible Windows, is not as powerful as I want with respect to
intelligent search, and I think other softwares in the market are not so 
intelligent in search, either. I used to write a computer program parsing 
natural language based on 
modern computational linguistics. I guess no bible software uses this 
advanced 
theory and techniques of parsing. Oh well.    


Moon Jung
Assoc. Prof.
Dept of Media Tech, 
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea


Moon R. Jung
Associate Professor
Dept of Media Technology
Graduate School of Media Comm
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea