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  • From: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • To: "b-hebrew list" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Circularity and other issues of logic
  • Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 14:28:32 -0700

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.




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