Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Shoshanna Walker wrote:

> "coloring the truth" - my words, not Rashi's or Abraham's, I could 
> have used different phrases but - I thought this was a list about 
> semantics in Hebrew, not English.
>
> The point being, that for whatever reasons Avraham thought he needed 
> to "lie" (which is not the point of this discussion, but we can cite 
> that, too...commentaries explain that in verse 2) - he did his best 
> to remain as close to the truth as possible.

HH: This is what I don't agree with. You are calling Abraham a liar, and 
I am not. That is the point of the discussion. There's no need to 
gratuitously call him a liar. Scripture does not require that.

> What difference does it make what you or I think would have been 
> simpler to have been written in the Torah, the Torah is very precise 
> in every single letter, including missing ones, and enlarged ones, 
> why it is written the way it is written.
>  

HH: Shoshanna, I tried to explain to you why the Book of Genesis did not 
mention Sarah's birth details in Genesis 11. It is extraneous to the 
flow of the text.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard

>