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  • From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] translations of important quotes using Rolf's ideas
  • Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:03:42 +0100

Dear Peter,

My personal viewpoints regarding prophecies are linguistically irrelevant. However, my observations are that some persons believe that real prophecies can be uttered before the events come, and others believe that accurate predictions before the events materialize are impossible. This last view was the original reason for the hypothesis that the book of Isaiah has several authors.

In my work with the Hebrew text I use the following assumption proposed by P. H. Grice in "Logic and Conversation". In "Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts," edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan: -Because the hearer assumes that the speaker is being cooperative, he assumes that the speaker will only say things that she believes to be relevant, informative, and true in that context.- This can be applied to texts as well. The are of course cryptic and figurative language where Grice´s assumption is not valid.

The point is that when a prophet spoke words which is his mind referred to the future, the reference of the verbs he used would be future. When a prophet who had seen some events wanted to write about these for an audience, and he would place his words in a prophetic setting, either to deceive his audience, or because he believed this was legitimate, he would still use verbs with future reference (there are examples of this in the Ethiopic Enoch). In other words, the prophet would choose his verbs as if he lived before the event. In this prophetic context only verbs with future reference would be "relevant, informative and true".

In my dissertation work I did an extensive linguistic research on verbs used in prophetic settings, and the interesting picture that emerged was that if the four-component model is followed strictly by the translators of prophecies, the result is often a zig-zag text as far as time is concerned, where past tense, present, present completed, and future tense are used, and the readers are completely confused as to the real time reference. Jeremiah 50 and 51 are examples of this.




----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kirk" <peter AT qaya.org>
To: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 7:24 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] translations of important quotes using Rolf's ideas


On 09/04/2007 18:24, Rolf Furuli wrote:
... As for Isaiah, the question is indifferent to the issue whether some of Isaiah´s words are prophecies ex eventu (spoken after the event). The answer sought is whether the writer wanted to apply the words to the future (if he wrote them after the event, he formed them as if they were written before the event). Thus, the time of writing is irrelevant for the answer.


Rolf, you seem to accept that an author can write an ex eventu prophecy as if it were future when in fact the events are past, in other words from a past deictic viewpoint, thus cancelling the uncancellable future semantic meaning components of future tenses. Do you not accept that an author can write genuiine predictive prophecy, or forecasts or speculation about the future, in the past tense from a future deictic viewpoint, thus cancelling the past semantic meaning components of past tenses?

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo





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