Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/9/06, Karl Randolph wrote:

> > 5) What happens in your story if the photo is found to be a photo
> > downloaded off the net and one cannot prove it was actually the
> > bad camera that shot the photo, so the photo could be a
> > forgery?

> I previously saw photos of this same stone in
> books, but linked to the online image because 1) it
> is available for all to look at it and 2) this is a
> better quality image than the photos I saw in
> books.
>
> You are grasping at straws again.

When you went back to the other line of argument, abandoning this
one about the Scandinavian stone, I thought you saw how wrong you
were.  Obviously, you think this is still valid evidence.  Since you
mention it from time to time, could you please validate this piece
of evidence?

What about points 1 - 4?

#1 - how can W in H(DW be waw possessive?  What would it mean?
"his ..."?
#2 - how can L( QBR Z LHSR H(DW DMYT LMRT
 לע קבר ז להסר העדו דמית למרת be said to be recognizably Biblical
Hebrew?  I think the only word there that is actually to be found in
the Bible is QBR קבר.  I could give you examples of Ugaritic that
are much more easily readable and recognizable than this.
#3 - The letters you interpret as the Ls, Ms, B, and Z are not Proto-
Sinaitic (for the letters you specify).  Others, like Y or Q don't look
the the Proto-Sinaitic, but look like the South Arabic letters.  Others,
like the first Ayin have a missing dot in the middle which is much
later than Proto-Sinaitic.  The second Ayin is a very bad circle, and
both Ayins miss the dot inside (which is a feature of proto-Canaanite,
proto-Sinaitic even has an oval shape for the eye).
#4 - Why should we believe you can tell Proto-Sinaitic from anything
else when you say yourself you haven't seen proto-Sinaitic inscriptions
to satisfactory quality?

And as for #5, the fact that you saw it in a book doesn't matter.  I don't
believe everything I read in books, and we can't look it up in the book
because you won't tell us which book.  We don't know who the author
is or what he says about the inscription.  Perhaps you don't even
remember.  Perhaps it was long after you saw it in the book that you
saw it in the internet site.  In this case, perhaps you are just confusing
similar or even not so similar inscriptions.  Your say-so that this is a
proto-Sinaitic inscription isn't very useful.

No matter how much this Scandinavian stone weighs, it is also a very
big straw.  It turns out your entire theory of CV pronunciation is based
among other things on a stone from Scandinavia.

Yitzhak Sapir