Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <vadim_lv AT center-tv.net>]

> >Everywhere but in Hebrew and to some extent in Chinese. Of course, modern
> >languages, for one, deviated from etymological meaning, and for another,
> >accumulated huge contexts. This does not work with Tanakh, ...


> So, are you claiming that Hebrew was preserved by divine intervention
> from the processes which affected all other human languages? Hebrew
> already had centuries, maybe millennia of use before the Bible was
> written and had plenty of time to accumulate "huge contexts" and
> semantic shift.

Had we possess these contexts now, I would agree with you. Since Tanakh is
more or less all we have from that time, other texts amounting to a fraction
of it, we have too little data for contextual analysis. Etymological
analysis is a better bet.
Had we the Library of Congress amount of data for Hebrew, I would agree with
you that we have to proceed contextually.

> In this case the better guide is that lamo usually has a plural
> or collective meaning, which makes a strictly singular referent in this
> case less likely. But there is simply insufficient evidence to
> completely rule out a singular referent.

The hope dies the last... There are probably die-hard folks around who still
believe in geocentric universe. No amount of data produces an absolute proof
in liberal or empirical sciences. Only in the most simple mathematics a
binary proof exists. Even non-linear geometry includes uncertainty of proof.
Sure, we cannot "completely rule out a singular referent." It is just highly
improbable.

Recall the earlier discussion on bmotaw. Even though no references to mot in
intense plural are encountered in Tanakh, and the whole concept is
exceedingly odd, some people here argued for emphatic instead of admitting
bmotaw for what it clearly is, a plural of boma. Negative proof is
impossible.

Vadim Cherny