Biblical Hebrew Forum

["B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com>]

Hi Peter,  You win on creating analogies, yours is better.

I chose mine because of the alien watching through his telescope.  He's 
analogous to us students of BH, trying, as an outside observer, to 
determine, not laws, but meanings of a code as people respond to the code 
behaviorally.  He will do it just fine in this case because it's very 
rudimentary communication.  Still, he will have to leave room in his 
explanations of the "language of New York roads" for the inevitable chaos.

Of course, BH is a much more complicated system.  It may even be more than 
one system when viewed as dialects or an evolution.  I would think that the 
more complicated the *behavior* system is, the more we should expect some 
chaotic behaviors.

Shalom,
Bryan

You wrote:
> I'm not sure that I like this traffic laws analogy. Sure, it explains why 
> people don't always follow the rules. But it also implies that there is 
> some set of prescriptive rules of language which people consciously break. 
> But there were no prescriptive rules in biblical times, which people could 
> get in trouble for breaking. There was just a set of conventions.
>
> Perhaps a better analogy would be that people don't go to weddings and 
> funerals in jeans or to the beach in a tux, although it is nowhere written 
> down that you mustn't. At least, usually they don't. If you find someone 
> breaking such rules, there may be a good reason, or it may just be that 
> someone is being eccentric, or doesn't understand the conventions. So you 
> are wasting your time trying to find explanations for every last case. And 
> if you go back to insisting that such social rules are meaningful (or 
> semantic) only if there are no exceptions, you have to conclude that there 
> are no meaningful rules.