Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 3/18/07, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> On 3/18/07, Rolf Furuli wrote:
>
> > My dissertation is not published privately but by Awatu Publishers, Oslo
> > Norway (awatu AT online.no), and it is
> > distributed by Eisenbrauns. I know that the publisher has sent  exemplars
> > for  a peer-review to several scholarly journals.

> To sum up:
> 1) Awatu Publishers is a Norwegian based publishing company.
> 2) Someone in Norway went through to the trouble of saying a study of yours
> which was published by Awatu Publishers was published privately, implying
> that it is your own publishing company.
> 3) The address of Awatu Publishers matches your address in the phonebook
> and another website.
> 4) Awatu Publishers appears to have published only two books, both of them
> by you.
> 5) Awatu Publishers has no website or independent phone number or address.
> 6) Awatu's email address and your email address are both at the same
> hosting company.
>
> In contrast, you imply that Awatu Publishers is not a private publishing
> company of yours and that you know that the publisher has sent exemplars
> to several scholarly journals.
>
> I note that the statement that you know that the publisher sent exemplars
> etc. is not inconsistent with the contrary claim that you are the publisher.
>
> I am not going to state anything categorical about you, or Awatu, and only
> say that list members can draw their own private conclusions.  Like anything
> else, it is just evidence.  Each person is entitled to his or her own
> interpretation
> of that evidence.

After careful consideration I feel that this little point here needs further
elaboration.  This is straying a bit from the main subject matter of the list,
but Rolf is relatively frequent in his postings to the list, mostly relating 
to
his revolutionary theory.  This post is not really so much about Rolf
himself, but a direct criticism of his thesis.  I think it is necessary to 
raise
this and I can only say that it is unfortunate that Rolf apparently had to
resort to using the methods he has used in advancing his thesis, as will
become clear by the end of this post.

According to the Wikipedia author quoted before, whose ip is from
Norway, Rolf is a Jehovah's Witness.

I don't know that he has ever identified himself as such, but this does make
sense in various issues.  A criticism of his book on chronology suggests that
he is simply recounting the chronology as advanced by Jehovah's Witnesses,
for example. He has some publications dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses
views, he does seem to have some outlooks similar to the rather fundamelist
views of Jehovah's Witnesses.  Also he takes a stand that at least in my
opinion disproportionately weighs the evidence against the name Yahweh.

When I realized initially how many Jehovah's Witnesses were on this list, I
started to read a bit, and came upon the claim that deception is a tool of
trade used by Jehovah's Witnesses.  However, I felt from the discussions
that those who participated on the list had wholesome intents.  I didn't pay
much attention to it.  In fact, until the above exchange, I didn't care if 
Rolf
was a fundamentalist or not, and I respected his claims of scholarship.  I
believed him when he said that a certain Biblical word appears with such and
such statistics.  I didn't try to enter the discussions of verbal forms which
often dealt with complex vocabulary.

What surprised me in the above is what appears to be a clear attempt to
misrepresent something intentionally.  That is, it isn't a mistake on Rolf's
part.  Rolf for some reason wanted to deceive me into believing the books
were not published privately.  Why, I have no idea.  I don't care much that
they were published privately or not.  It is more important to me whether
they were reviewed by experts.  Indeed,  Rolf attempts furthermore to
suggest he has passed the book on to peer-reviewed journals to review
the book.  But obviously a review written in a peer-reviewed journal would
at most be itself reviewed.  The book itself was not reviewed before
publication, which is what peer review means.

So really, in the end, a small point.  I just said it was published privately,
and Rolf stated that it was not, despite the fact that he apparently knows
full well that he published it privately, since he is himself the publisher.
But Rolf goes to a long extent apparently to suggest he isn't publishing it
privately, and says that he knows the publisher sent it off to review --
distancing himself from the "publisher."  Then one does not find the name
Rolf or Awatu identified together except as one being the author and one
being the publisher.  That is, this deception is not just in this mail to me,
but appears to be intentional to begin with.  The creation of Awatu appears
to have been done in order to separate Rolf from the publisher of these
two books.  So really, who cares?  It's not the cover but the content that
counts, right?  So what if it was published privately?  But then, why the
deception?  One is entitled to ask, "If he deceives here, could he deceive
elsewhere -- where it does matter?"

The first connection that took to me was a post by Peter Kirk on this list a
few days ago:

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2007-March/031665.html

Peter writes, "And let me repeat that the facts prove you wrong. ... If you
want to dispute the facts or how they have been arrived at, you are
welcome to do so. But if you don't, I and other readers here will doubtless
conclude that you cannot do so. And since we know that you have the raw
data available, we have to assume that you cannot refute the facts only
because my facts are correct.  Yes, 'we have reached the same point as
we have so many times in the past', where I have found an argument
against your theories which you cannot answer, and so you simply try to
dismiss me with ad hominem arguments like "You search the Internet, find
some statistics here and there" and "without ever having made a deep
study of the subject", also no doubt "SPERMOLOGOS" but I have no idea
what you mean. I have come to recognise that you do this only and always
when you find that an error in your arguments has been exposed, but you
are not prepared to admit it."  Now, Peter relates only to errors, but what if
these errors were intentional -- deceptions to begin with.  What if they were
not simply errors that were exposed, but deceptions that were exposed?

Later I also considered the issue of methodology which I have been
pressing the last few days.  Indeed, Rolf did not deny or substantiate his
methodology.  He admitted he was "not perfect".  But what if the flawed
methodology was not just a failure to be perfect, what if it is also a tool.
What if Rolf intentionally uses flawed methodology?  This came, anyway
after I started reading the following article.

But at this point I remembered that mention I happened upon so long ago
about Jehovah's Witnesses and deception.  After a little searching I found
the following:

"Lying in Court and Religion: An Analysis of the Theocratic Warfare
Doctrine of the Jehovah's Witnesses", by Jerry Bergman, PhD.
Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2002

One can read it at: http://www.freeminds.org/doctrine/lyingincourt.doc
or an html version generated by google at:
http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:ogGtJJYm-fYJ:www.freeminds.org/doctrine/lyingincourt.doc

Now, Rolf's other book by "Awatu" aka Rolf was criticised for expounding a
Jehovah's Witness chronology in the guise of academic study.  Maybe this
book is to be criticised for expounding a Jehovah's Witness verbal system
in the guise of academic study.  That is, this isn't a simple revolutionary
attempt to read the verbal system of Hebrew.  It is an attempt to defend a
Jehovah's Witness outlook on the verbal system.  For example, perhaps
let us assume that because of some lack of expertise on the part of NWT
translators, some verbs which were intended past were translated future.
Rolf's study then comes to an aid and says that this is not a problem
because it is not that NWT translators got it wrong.  It is that we don't
understand the verbal system of Hebrew.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with a fresh new study of the verbal
system of Hebrew.  There is nothing wrong with a revolutionary reading
of the verbal system.  What would come out of the above is that the
study may be an attempt to defend the good name of the Jehovah's
Witness organization.  In order to do that, it is apparently permissible
(according to the above article) for Jehovah's Witnesses to deceive
and outright lie to those who are not entitled to know the truth.  If a
Jehovah's Witness is not always entitled to know the truth, then
apparently non-Jehovah's Witnesses on the list certainly fit in the
category of "enemies."

So there may be an agenda, and a willful attempt to deceive in a study
such as Rolf, if it is, of course, an attempt to defend the good name of
the Jehovah's Witness organization.  Circumstantially, it may appear that
this is the case, and also that indeed deceptions or errors are used.  The
above tiny example regarding "private publishing" may be a clear case
where true deception, not an error, has been exposed.  But one is left to
wonder regarding the errors Peter notes, or the flawed methodology that
I attempted to pinpoint.  These may not be simple errors or oversights,
but real tools from the point of view of Rolf.  Most of us do not have at
our hands the ability to check Rolf's statistics of various hebrew forms.
But in light of the above, can we trust them?

For me, in any case, the answer is a clear resounding No.  I normally
accept the good will and intentions of those who put their efforts into
studying a subject, even if they are "fundamentalist-minded", as Rolf
may be described and as I originally viewed Rolf.  When I originally
wrote to Rolf that his other verse example to contrast with 1 Kings 6:1
is methodologically flawed because it doesn't exist, I viewed that as
secondary.  But it is now clear to me that Rolf could conceivably and
in my view, very probably has, made up and invented data for the
advancement of his position.

I welcome the study by George Athas.  I am not saying a new reading
of the Hebrew verbal system is out of place.  I also think most Jehovah
Witness members of this list are probably wholesome in their intentions,
although I would probably be double checking from now on.  But I cannot
trust the data, conclusions, and methods as discussed by Rolf.  I must
conclude that they could be heavily doctored to an agenda that
attempts to justify Jehovah's Witnesses' view and translation of
the Bible, to the point where the data would not just be deceptive, but
be even totally made up.

I suppose that from my point of view, no "yiqtol" so clearly and succinctly
displays the problems in Rolf's thesis than the one in Exodus 23:7a.

Yitzhak Sapir