Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:

On 7/14/06, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear James and Karl,
>
> Your latest posts show some claims of logical fallacies,
> but a closer look will show that there is no logical fallacy
> involved.
>
> For example, Karl wrote:
> > You are making an assumption of borrowing that has no evidence to back
> > up your assumption. Just because surviving copies of Enuma Elish are
> > older than surviving copies of accounts of Genesis Flood, does not
> > make it the older account.
>
> I am not dealing here with the issue of borrowing from
> Enuma Elish, since this is not the position I hold or have
> suggested on list.  However, the second sentence presents
> a logical fallacy.  If we have two documents, and we can
> definitely date one a thousand years earlier than the second,
> this provides evidence that the first one is the older account
> or document.

This works only if we have the originals of the documents.

But when one deals with copies, that all goes out the window.

For example, the oldest copies of the New Testament that we have,
complete copies, date from the fourth century AD, the oldest copy of
the Odessy dates from the eighth century AD. According to your
argument, the New Testament is older than Homer.

> ....  We may argue that the two are copies
> themselves of older documents and it is possible that the
> second one is older than the first.  However, that argument
> would be made on pure speculative grounds.

Not necessarily. It is speculation to say that the copies of Tanakh
that we have from Qumran are not copies, in that the documents
themselves claim to earlier authorship and tradition claims that no
book of Tanakh was authored later than the time of Ezra.

We don't know if the copy of Enuma Elish found in Babylon is a copy or
original. If original, it is definitely a later document than Genesis
1. If a copy, then we have to look to other clues which is the older.

> ...
>
> > Yitzhak:
> > Again, I am not saying the reference is to the Babylonian
> > Tiamat, but rather to the Canaanite counterpart Tehom.
> > END QUOTE
> >
> > JCR: Do you have any evidence of a Canaanite goddess
> > named Tehom? If not, this is merely speculation based
> > on non verifiable assumptions.
>
> While the above is technically correct, because we have
> relatively few religious literary texts from Canaan and
> Phoenician sources themselves, we do have sources from
> Ugarit which is relatively similar.  But even without such
> evidence, we would simply not know whether or not there
> was a Canaanite god or goddess Tehom.

So you admit that the existence of such a goddess is pure speculation.

> Another problem with responding to Karl and James is arguments
> such as the following:
>
> > > Gen 49:25 The parallelism $mym/thwm immediately
> > > follows )l )byk/$dy, which is clearly a divine
> > >
> > ...not!
>
> I don't know where or how to start?  Shaday and )el )abika are
> definitely divine.  At least, I think so.  So how do I respond?
> "..is too!"?  This may be seen as an extreme case of arguing
> without specific evidence.

Go back and read the text, in Hebrew. While the text is poetic in
format, $MYM and THWM are not in parallel with $DY and )L, rather the
sentence structure puts them in the object phrases of the verb, while
$DY and )L are the subject. Not parallel at all. If you want to
divinize heavens and depths, then to be consistent you need to
divinize breasts and womb, in the same verse.

> ...
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
> http://toldot.blogspot.com

Karl W. Randolph.