Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>]

Peter wrote:
And I think even the most conservative interpreters accept 
that at least part of the remaining 5%, especially chapter 34, was not 
in fact written by Moses.
end quote.

There are two possibilities here. One proposition is that it was originally 
the beginning of the book of Joshua and was kept at the end of the scroll 
as an introduction to the book of Joshua and to recall to the reader that, 
although the two scrolls had two different authors, the true author was yah
and that the two scrolls should be considered as a the one book by the one 
true author, yhwh.
Another possibility is that Moshe, as a prophet inspired by Yah, knew that he 
was about to die (and this had in fact been told to him by Yahowah himself) 
and therefore was able to pen the words himself.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk AT qaya.org]
Sent: Fri 7/29/2005 8:01 PM
To: Read, James C
Cc: Jim West; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Author of the torah
 
On 29/07/2005 19:28, Read, James C wrote:

>Quote:
>There are three places where Moses is said to have written something- Ex 
>24:4, Dt 31:9, 31:22.  An even not so careful reading will show that the 
>reference to Moses writing refers only to the present pericope.
>end quote.
>
>Have you read Deouteronomy 31:9 closely?
>What did he write?
>The law???
>How do you say 'law' in hebrew?
>Isn't it something like 'torah'?
>And the name of the book attributed to Moshe?
>The torah???
>
>My! What an amazing coincidence!!!
>  
>

Surely not, James. See also 31:24, which Jim just happens to have 
forgotten, which states that Moses wrote down this law, hattora hazzo't, 
`ad tummam which means something like "completely". In other words, this 
verse seems to be an explicit claim that Moses wrote down the whole of 
the Torah.

But then what was meant by the Torah? Not necessarily all of the five 
books now known as such. But 31:9,24 must be a claim at least that Moses 
wrote down the complete contents of what he had just spoken, also 
referred to as "this law", hattora hazzo't, in 1:5. And this happens to 
be the major part of the book of Deuteronomy, from 1:6 to 30:20 - except 
for 27:1a,9a,11 and 29:1,2, which are the only parts of this which are 
not presented as the words of Moses. Additionally, large parts of 
chapters 31-33 are presented as Moses' words, and in 31:22 it is stated 
that he wrote down his song which is 32:1-43. So, we have about 95% of 
the book presented as Moses' words and 85% explicitly stated as written 
down by him. And I think even the most conservative interpreters accept 
that at least part of the remaining 5%, especially chapter 34, was not 
in fact written by Moses.

Of course some might want to dispute whether the internal claims of the 
book are reliable. But it is necessary to recognise first that these 
claims are being made.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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>From Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu  Fri Jul 29 15:12:33 2005
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Machine translation of the Bible,
        was:  heno- v's poly- theismin the torah
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James,

How does the fact that biblical Hebrew has a very limited corpus and
can no longer (if it ever could have been) be observed in daily use
affect the project? Your "childlike" AI will not be able to observe
real speakers of biblical Hebrew as it could, for example, observe
real use of modern Japanese or French. It seems to me that even if
your AI engine is solid and all your language acquisition models are
spot-on, these pragmatic limitations will hamper the program's
learning ability. How have you addressed these issues?

Thanks,

Chris

On Jul 29, 2005, at 11:42 AM, Read, James C wrote:

>
> The major reason for their failings is the presupposition that our
> division and definition of words is correct. Current translating
> programs are largely literally based and for this reason they produce
> such poor translations.
>
> I agree that the project is complex but I have full faith in its
> possibility.
> The very fact that children can learn a language without having to
> depend on
> translations shows that the algorithms exist and the program will
> just as much
> a pyscholgical one as a linguistic one.
>
> The secret is in finding the algorithms which I believe lie more
> the minds of
> children than in the prowess of 'scholars'.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Kirk [mailto:peterkirk AT qaya.org]
> Sent: Fri 7/29/2005 5:54 PM
> To: Read, James C
> Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Machine translation of the Bible, was: [b-hebrew] heno-
> v's poly- theismin the torah
>
> On 29/07/2005 16:39, Read, James C wrote:
>
>
>> ...
>> In fact, I firmly believe that grammar is more of a hindrance
>> than a help to learning a language and I intend to demonstrate
>> this with my AI project.
>> The purpose of my project is to develop algorithms which analyse
>> any input of language. The alphabet it will use will be based
>> on phonemes and not the inadequate arrays of alphabets that
>> modern languages use.
>> The algorithms will completely avoid grammar and rely entirely
>> on examples and contexts to learn the meanings of words (a word
>> is a series of sounds/phonemes and may not necessarily agree with
>> the classical division of words we are accustomed to).
>> It is my aim that this tool will produce a translation of the
>> hebrew bible, which is completely devoid of doctrinal influences,
>> as a demonstration that the natural way of learning languages
>> is the superior one. It's a big project and the algorithms have
>> many challenges but I am benefitting from the thoughts posted
>> in the various threads.
>>
>>
>>
>>
> James, I wish your project well, but I am not very hopeful for you.
>
> After all, researchers have been working on machine translation
> between
> major world languages for many decades, and the best results that they
> can come up with are appalling. For example, a few years ago I used
> Babelfish to translate Psalm 23:1 from English to Chinese to
> English and
> from German to English, and in both cases got the result "The Lord is
> not my shepherd"! (The "not" was wrongly transferred from the second
> clause.) And even when used on actual web pages the results were
> frequently incomprehensible.
>
> To come up with a useable Bible translation from Hebrew you will
> have to
> do very much better than such programs can do even from German. And
> yet
> the only way you can do this in a way which "is completely devoid of
> doctrinal influences" (a laudable aim, although I don't think an
> achievable one) is to avoid "teaching" the program with ANY
> human-generated translations of Bible passages. But then, as I
> understand it (although I am not at all an expert), the only way that
> the current generation of machine translators can make any real
> progress
> is by matching to patterns found in real examples of human-generated
> translation. So you will need to find a new approach here.
>
> Sorry to be discouraging. I fear that your aim is unattainable. But I
> hope that it is not.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
>
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--
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