Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Kevin Graham" <kevlds AT hotmail.com>]

I'm sorry David, could you be a litle more clearer? Was that a direct 
citation from the source you provided?


> From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
> To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew "If-and" construction and the Book of
> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:04:38 +1000
>
> Cross-linguistically, some language coordinators/conjunctions commonly
> group meanings which other languages choose to divide (see the reference
> below). It is not uncommon for a single coordinator to group the
> meanings "and", "sequential" (then), "resultative" (so that), etc. The
> Morman translation, then, has failed to recognise that what Hebrew does
> with the one coordinator/conjunction (waw) English regularly does with
> two ("and", "then").
>
> Malchukov, Andrej. 2004. “Towards a Semantic Typology of Adversative and
> Contrast Marking.” Journal of Semantics 21: 177-198.
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
> >
> > I am looking to get some confirmation about an apologetic that is
> > growing in popularity among Latter-day Saints. For those who are not
> > familiar with the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith claims to have
> > translated the text from gold plates that were written upon an Ancient
> > Hebrew writer.
> >
> > The original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon include weird phrases
> > that involve an if-and construction instead of an if-then
> > construction. According to Mormon scholar Royal Skousen:
> >
> > "In a recent paper I describe two important examples of Hebraisms in
> > the original text of the Book of Mormon that do not occur in the King
> > James Bible. One example is the use of the if-and clausal construction
> > instead of the expected if-(then) syntax of English, as in the
> > following extended passage from Helaman 12 where it occurs seven times
> > (thus showing that we are not dealing with an isolated transcriptional
> > error):
> >
> > if he sayeth unto the earth move and it is moved
> >
> > if he sayeth unto the earth thou shalt go back that it lengthen out
> > the day for many hours and it is done .
> >
> > if he sayeth unto the waters of the great deep be thou dried up and it
> > is done.
> >
> > This construction is a literalistic translation of the Hebrew-language
> > construction, but does not occur at all in the King James Bible."
> >
> > For our Hebrew experts out there, is it true that the "if-and"
> > construction is a common occurence in the Hebrew Bible, and is it also
> > true that this lingustic phenomenon is unique only to Hebrew?
> >
>
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