Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Maybe this is not the best example but I didn't want to spend too long on 
answering.

Exodus 2:19-20 says

 19  To this they said: “A certain Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of 
the shepherds and, besides, he actually drew water for us that he might water 
the flock.” 20  Then he said to his daughters: “But where is he? Why is it 
that YOU have left the man behind? Call him, that he may eat bread.”

We go from 'he drew water from us' to 'Then he said'.

The subjects of the two verbs are clearly different and it is the context 
which helps 
us to clear the matter up. The first subject is referring to Moshe, while, 
the second
subject is the girls' father. Without a larger context we have no way of 
attributing 
the correct subjects to these verbs and there are countless parts of the 
tanakh where
only the context helps us to correctly identify them.

Your current understanding of 2Sam24 does not make sense

24:1 Yah gets angry
24:2 Because he's angry he gets David to do something bad
24:3 David is warned that this is against Yah's will (why didn't David answer 
'But yah told
me to do it'?)
24:4 David insists and gets his own way
24:9 Joab finished the dastardly dead
24:10 David realises he has done bad with no intervention from Yah to the 
tune of
'I only got you to do it so that I could punish you (even though I already 
had good 
reasons to do so(murder etc.))

The context demands another subject for the second verse.
The chronicler understood it. Iunderstand it.
There is no real reason for understanding that the subject is the same if not 
for to 
be able to have an excuse to criticise the bible.


-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Heard, Christopher
Sent: Fri 8/5/2005 4:32 PM
To: b-hebrew
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Is.45:7 God created evil?
 
On Aug 5, 2005, at 6:30 AM, Read, James C wrote:
> This is not the only case in scripture where the agent is ambiguous  
> and it is
> clear that the chronicler, whose hebrew was better than ours, did  
> not understand
> the agent to be Yah's anger but 'an adversary' or Satan himself.
> Your interpretation of the verse does not make sense.
>
> Yah got angry because David obeyed him?????
>
> The chronicler, evidently, was not led to understand such a thing  
> and so his
> version of events clears the ambiguity by making the agent of the  
> second clause
> explicit.
[/James]

James, your reasoning quoted above begs the question by _assuming_  
(a) that the Chronicler understood 1 Chron 21:1 to be recapitulating  
the meaning of 2 Sam 24:1 rather than altering it, (b) that both the  
"Deuteronomistic Historian" and the Chronicler though it  
inappropriate for YHWH to incite someone into an action and then  
punish them for that action, (c) that 2 Sam 24:1 is ambiguous, and  
(d) that the Chronicler is using the word _satan_ in 2  Sam 24:1 to  
refer to some entity other than YHWH. All of these things need to be  
_demonstrated_, not _assumed_, in order for an answer like the above  
to have persuasive force.

Perhaps just to focus on (c) for a moment: Are there any (other)  
sentences in Hebrew biblical narrative, structured as /verb/ / 
subject/ ... /verb/ ..., with both verbs in WAYIQQTOL, both verbs  
3ms, where the second verb _demonstrably_ has an implicit subject  
different from the explicit subject of the first verb? I don't know  
if there aren't or are any such, because I haven't looked for them.  
But if you want to _persuasively_ argue against the syntactical  
principle that Peter mentioned earlier, some answer to this question  
needs to be forthcoming.

Best wishes,

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

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