Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Kenneth:

What most people forget, and many scholars want us to forget, is that
scholars are people with the same failings and foibles as all other
people. One of the results of that is that scholars often do not
accept new ideas, which led to a sentence popular when I was in
college, "New ideas don't win because they convince old professors,
but because they outlive old professors." In other words, the new
ideas of young turks usually don't convince old professors, but in the
end prevail because the young turks outlive the old professors. This
is often true even in the "hard" sciences.

Now we come to a study of a long dead language, where the last
unquestionably native speaker (at least one not influenced by Aramaic
or other language in his formative years) died 2500 years ago, that
was written only in consonants so we can't be sure even of the
pronunciation, yet it had a certain amount of variance in spelling,
and of course there will be disagreements. When working with such a
fuzzy data set, of course each researcher will have his personal
biases and beliefs influence how he perceives the data.

Personal beliefs and biases can influence even the choice of
methodology, which in turn influences what one thinks is important,
and not important even to the point of irrelevance.

As for Rolf Furuli and his theories, I don't know what to make of
them. But it is a legitimate question how much his personal beliefs
affect the theories. If he can satisfactorily show that they are not
connected, that will remove one impediment to others accepting them.

One of the difficulties in this discussion is that Rolf apparently has
chosen a methodology that is at variance with that chosen by most
researchers. As a result, some things he thinks as important, most
researchers will consider unimportant, and some things he thinks as
unimportant, other researchers consider vital. It will be interesting
to see if the two sides can at least communicate effectively.

Karl W. Randolph.

On 3/20/07, kenneth greifer <greifer AT hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am not a scholar, and I have not understood anything in the argument about
> Rolf's dissertation or whatever the discussion has been about. I am just
> curious about how scholars debate normally. Is the debate that you've been
> doing on B-Hebrew the normal way that scholars discuss controversial
> subjects or is this somehow different? Also, when someone has a
> controversial opinion like Rolf, don't scholars analyze the ideas right away
> because it sounds like his ideas have been around for a while and no one has
> analyzed them. Maybe I did not understand the discussion, but it sounds like
> this to me.
>
> Kenneth Greifer
> USA