Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 7/2/06, Karl Randolph wrote:

For the benefit of the newcomer who asked for a
better delineation of assumptions and positions:

Karl's original stone message is to be found here-
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2003-October/016510.html
It may be hard to follow the discussion and to
understand what is being referenced without
seeing that post.  A much better source for that
inscription is provided later on in this post.

By "evolution of Semitic languages", I refer to the
modern accepted reconstruction of Semitic languages.
A good article on Proto-Semitic, written by John
Huehnergard is at:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html
Towards the end of the first section he discusses
the various branchings off from Proto-Semitic and
even provides a chart:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/JPG/tree.jpg

A good description of the "comparative linguistic"
method is at:
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html
A better article is "Reconstructing Ancient Languages"
in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient
Languages.

> You are getting dirty and personal again, which is
> a sign that I should bow out of this discussion. In
> fact, that is why the moderators told us to knock
> it off last time we got into a knock down, drag it
> out argument.

"Last time", it was you who kept making personal
attacks.  I agree that this time around I have been
making statements of the form "don't invent claims
about things you know nothing about."  But it does
appear you know very little about Ugarit, and have
very little incentive to learn.  I made some claims,
which Dave Washburn contested.  For one of these
contested claims, I based my claim mostly on my
general understanding of the history of Semitic
linguistics.  What I have to do now (and will do, as
time permits) is to go to the library to try to look up
and place that claim on more secure footing than
"reasonable assumptions."  Because I have an
incentive to learn, I can go ahead and learn and see
if I can secure the argument or else I need to
withdraw it.  You do not seem to want to learn about
Ugarit, but that does not prevent you from making
various claims about it or the language spoken.  If
you want to dispute widely accepted facts about
Ugaritic, Canaanite, and Semitic linguistics, you
need to do your own in-depth study.  You can't
dispute it on the grounds you don't know any better
and don't want to know any better.

> As for the disputed stone, once you gave me a clue
> as to where to find more information on the web
> other than what I claimed was a flakey, hence
> untrustworthy site (I mentioned that it was a clue
> only because I had seen photos of the stone in
> books as well), I found information where it was
> found, that it was not in the deserts of eastern
> nor southern Jordan, and if you truly are a
> scholar, you can find that information too.

Yes, but when you took it off the flakey website,
you had no problem with its purported location
(Scandinavia) for your interpretation (Sinaitic).  You
give yourself more slack and simpler standards than
what you give the experts.  And yet, unlike the
experts, you are less familiar with both Sinaitic and
Safaitic inscriptions.  Together, the lack of familiarity
and the simpler standards are dangerous.

I don't know what you found on the web about the
stone now.  Last time around, I told you that it was
found at Umm al-Hawa because that is what the
Museum link gave.  Various places with similar
names are found in Jordan and Iraq, and I had no
idea in exactly which area it was found.  But since
you just now suggested I look it up some more, I
looked it up in the following book:

Music in Ancient Palestine/Israel: Archaeological,
Written, and Comparative Sources, by Joachim
Braun, 2002.
http://www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~BRAMUSICI

The book can be browsed using Google books.
Specifically, look around pages 217-220, using the
following link.  The search results will be on the
lower right where you can flip forward to these
pages:

http://books.google.com/books?as_oq=safaitic+pipe&as_isbn=0802844774

It becomes clear that I read the letters correctly, but
the first two words that I read "l(qr bn" are read by the
author as one word "l(qrbn" - to/of/for/by Aqraban.  (It
also makes a lot more sense).  The translation given
then is "By Aqraban, son of Kasit, son of Said, The
beautiful one plays the pipe."  All the other comments I
made are on target.  The inscription is said to be from
the Harra desert, in northeastern Jordan.  It is interesting
to compare your original suggested reading with the
correct reading, since many letters were identified
correctly:
L( QBR   Z     LHSR   H(DW DMYT LMRT  <- Karl
L(QRBN BN KS+ BN S(D HDMYT ZMRT <- Correct

I say it is interesting because thinking of some other
situations -- say the Byblos Pictographic Inscriptions
-- it shows how even assuming the correct values for
quite a few letters may not permit proper
decipherment.

> Unless you can produce documents showing that what
> we have are not close copies of older documents
> reflecting the older linguistics, your claim has
> no merit.

Now that is a logical fallacy.  Exactly what kind of
documents do you want me to produce?  What kind
of evidence / documents would satisfy you?  The
problem here is that you hold an assumption ("what
we have are close copies of older documents
reflecting the older linguistics"), which by the way, is
one that is not required in any way by the Bible, and
is not mentioned in any way in the Bible, and you
expect me to disprove the assumption, rather than
you having to prove your said assumption.  The
burden of proof is on the person making the
assumption or claim.  Incidentally, it is exactly this
assumption that I had essentially requested you to
support in my questions at the very end of the post.
Your conclusion: "they're not worthy of an answer."

You write: "I never claimed that the orthography
points to an earlier writing, as all that we have are
copies, and as I said elsewhere, orthography can
only indicate when the copies were made," as
apparently one example of a straw man argument
of mine.  If you look at what I said in the previous
post, you'll see that I didn't claim you said that "the
orthography points to an earlier writing", rather that
you said that the orthography is essentially the same
as during the 2nd millenium BCE.   Look up at the
above assumption in your own quoted sentence,
and you will see that it seems to be suggested even
in that sentence.  Indeed, you had in the past
defended the use of "w" as a suffix for third-person
masculine possessive, even though pre-exilic
inscriptions almost exclusively use "h". To
support specifically this claim that "w" as a suffix
goes back to the 2nd millenium, you brought the
flakey website inscription, which now stands as a
prime example of how you let your own personal
unsupported assumptions and beliefs stand in the
face of evidence.  So while you might not have
made a general claim on orthography as a whole
being the same, you made some specific claims
that very much suggested this position.

As for Shakespeare, it was recently discussed on
list and you might want to review that discussion
since you make claims now that are not consistent
with the evidence discussed in that context.

> What you need is a large body of transitional
> documents from Ugaritic to Biblical Hebrew to
> demonstrate that Ugaritic is ancestral to Biblical
> Hebrew. You have failed to produce that body of
> documents.
[...]
> That is how you would establish the
> evolution of Semitic languages, by using
> extensive documentation.

For a review of proper comparative method, and its
application to Semitic, see the links I provided at
the start of the post.  To take Greek as an example,
one did not need extensive documentation from PIE
to Greek to show that Greek is an Indo-European
language.  Furthermore, even when Linear B
documents were discovered, that, while filling a gap
in the evolution of Greek still did not provide the same
kind of extensive transitional documentation that you
expect of Hebrew vs. Canaanite.  One does not need
the extensive documentation you demand.  Rather,
one needs to securely and methodologically apply
the comparative method.

Your assumptions which I questioned and which you
claimed are "not worthy of an answer" still stand as the
weakest and most important claims that made without
any evidence to support them.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com