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  • From: "Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] YHWH
  • Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 22:21:10 -0700

On Jul 26, 2005, at 8:53 PM, Bearpecs AT aol.com wrote:
I think it is unwarranted to suggest that they didn't know that Ba`al of
Tsafon was the same god as Ba`al of Pe`or; just as Catholics know that their
Lady of Lourdes is the same as their Lady of Guadalupe. We are arrogant if we
assume that they just couldn't be as sophisticated as we in conceptualizing
the divine.

Okay, I'm not a moderator of this list or anything ... just a mostly- lurker who chimes in from time to time, usually before thinking carefully about what he's saying. :-) But could I respectfully suggest to one and all that if this particular tangent is to continue, it ought to focus not on "ad hominem" arguments about who is or is not arrogant, but on the matter of linguistic usage, specifically the speech-act of referring? The study of the biblical Hebrew language is, after all, the raison d'etre of this list, and the reason I signed up. So here are a couple of clusters of language- oriented observations and questions--not grammatical or morphological, but pragmatic or in the realm of speech-act theory or wherever you want to "peg" them--that could potentially move this discussion forward in what I personally would find to be an interesting and helpful direction:

1. I recommend that for purposes of any discussion about what ancient speakers "meant" when they referred to gods, that the metaphysical question of whether those gods exist[ed] should be bracketed. That is, if a Canaanite says "Ba'al," it is irrelevant to that Canaanite's semantic meaning/intention whether Ba'al really exists or not (what the Canaanite believes about Ba'al's existence and identity is relevant, but not Ba'al's actual ontology, if any). In this forum, any such discussion ought to focus on the linguistic act of referring.

2. What counts as evidence for whether two speakers who use two different words intend to refer to the same entity? This question bedevils my students when we talk about the "names of God" in the Old Testament. They all agree that an English-speaking Christian who prays to "God" and a Spanish-speaking Christian who prays to "Dios" intend to pray to the same entity, but they cannot agree among themselves whether an Arabic-speaking Christian who prays to "Allah" and an Arabic-speaking Muslim who prays to "Allah" refer to the same entity. How do you know, Jim, that a Canaanite speaking of "El Elyon" and a second Canaanite speaking of "El Shaddai" thought they were talking about different gods? Hayyim, how do you know (aside from the example of Catholic Mariological references, which proves nothing about ancient Levantine referential practices) that those two Canaanites thought they were talking about the same God? (Substitute the names of other gods, e.g., the Ba'al of Pe'or vs. Ba'al-Berith, or whatever, as appropriate.) What counts as evidence to demonstrate either claim, and what such evidence is available?

It might be worth remembering that Albrecht Alt's claim that the "gods of the fathers" (e.g., Elohe-Abraham, Paqad-Yitzhaq, 'abbir- Ya'akov) was built on arguments from the use of language, the central argument being that the phrase "god of PN" semantically meant "the god who was first worshiped by PN." I happen to think Alt's comparative material might be a bit far afield, but that's not my point. My point is that the question of reference in the ancient use of divine names falls within the purview of the b-hebrew list, but that tossing around pejorative adjectives doesn't get us to the meat of the discussion of reference (if that's a discussion listers want to have).

BTW, my Ph.D. training was actually rather weak in terms of linguistics per se, and anything I know about speech act theory or discourse analysis I have picked up in my own supplementary reading, so would those of you more skilled in those types of analysis please forgive me if I have misused any technical terms drawn from those fields? TIA.

Chris
--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info




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