Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org> wrote, inter alia,
>

:... the position I have put forward, that the 
Exodus account is coherent but possibly fictional. Maybe it was written 
by a Judahite author pushing a theological view. That isn't my preferred 
position, but I deliberately left this issue open. But if it was, we can 
expect that author to have written a text which makes sense. While it is 
possible that he or she copied passages from very different stories, the 
chance of being able to reconstruct those stories reliably is minimal - 
unless basically they were the same story in a different form....


> 
"...I have made a decision that the Exodus story is coherent narrative, and 
that there is no good evidence not to accept it as a generally 
historical narrative in the same way as most other ancient documents 
which purport to narrate events are understood as generally historical. 
But I accept some later redaction.

.    UH :  No one is obliged to take a position. However, it helps, if one 
does, to state it with clarity. I find the statements above a bit confusing.

   My position  about the Exodus narratives , and I use the plural here 
intentionally, is that  they preserve only  a genral memory of past events, 
as indeed is the case with other segments early Israelite history in the HB. 
Scholars have different names to describe the historical value of such broad 
canvas; "proto - history'" is  used by A. Malamat to describe the period of 
the Patriarchs,  for example. I prefer the term Outline History.

  Uri
> 
>




                
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>From kwrandolph AT email.com  Mon Sep 20 18:37:12 2004
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From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:37:10 -0500
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Genre & inference
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Clay:

I can think of one consequence for the lexicographer.

There is the temptation to view each use of a lexeme as explicit, making a 
semantic lexicon give a lexeme that is sometimes used explicitly, sometimes 
implicitly, multiple, unrelated definitions.

When I question word definitions, one of my questions is, “Is this an example 
of explicit or implicit speech?” In other words, are the words to be 
understood as commonly used, or do we have an example like Peter Kirk’s 
“Yeah, right!”? That is sometimes difficult to answer, but made easier by 
trying to be very careful in lexicography.

As a translator, OTOH, there is often no corrosponding implicit speech in the 
target language, forcing the translator to make explicit what the text has as 
implicit. Thus a dictionary specifically made for translators will include 
explicit meanings that may be accurate only for the target language, and 
incorrect for others.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "C. Stirling Bartholomew" <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>

> 
> Genre & Inference
> 
> A communication event mediated by a text could be viewed as having a ratio
> of explicit : implicit content. The ratio is related to genre.
> 
> In the Hebrew Bible, the story line of Exodus is going to have a higher
> level of explicit content than Isaiah.
> 
> I suspect this has implications for both exegetes and translators.
> What are they?
> 
> greetings,
> Clay Bartholomew 
-- 
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