Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

David,

I don't know what "deconstructionist" means for you, but it apparently means
something different than what it means in scholarship.  So it would be best
if you did not employ it.  Similarly, the terms "maximalist" and "minimalist"
don't do much if you use them one way and I use them in a different way. I
don't understand why you think appropriating terms used in scholarship and
giving them your own totally different meanings advances discussion of
scholarship.  The same can be said for the "choir" analogy.

To understand the "choir" issue, you have to go back to my original message
where I explained why the nature of the b-hebrew list itself prevents many
scholars from maintaining active participation.  To explain this, I 
constructed
a hypothetical list which in my opinion would have been more conducive to a
discussion between both scholars and laymen on a wide variety of issues, not
just linguistic.  The issue of biblical historicity was only one of
the issues that
was dealt with.  Separate issues included such things as matters of fact, and
what I called oddball theories.  I am not saying attempts to question certain
facts or attempts to raise "oddball theories" wouldn't "have their day" during
discussion on such a hypothetical list, but that is all they would have.  
There
wouldn't be endless constant suggestions of infixed pronouns based on
Modern Hebrew pronunciation, phonological reconstructions that ignore a
wide array of evidence we do have for such reconstructions, claims of
attestations of Biblical Hebrew that don't exist, etc.  These are "oddball"
theories or issues of fact.  One person, who read my message as calling
for censorship of those claims on this list, likened it to a choir.  I in 
turn,
likened it to a discussion of a flat earth on an astronomy forum.  Claims of
biblical historicity is not what I likened to a flat earth claim, nor do I see
them as such.

The only evidence of "attack-mode" is messages like yours or those that
called what I said "battle tactics" etc. Your discussion of Midrash vs.
scholarship attempts to find differences where there is none.  Midrash is
actually the initial attempts for systematic study of the Bible, including
defining the methodology (the rules of midrash of R' Yishmael, for
example).  In fact, that is what midrash means.  Compare:
byt mdr$ - http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/cgi-bin/jpaoff.cgi?off=312398
dr$ - http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/cgi-bin/jpaoff.cgi?off=613968
mdr$ - http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/cgi-bin/jpaoff.cgi?off=1267920
You can also compare the terms in Arabic for "school" or "teacher."

Yitzhak Sapir