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  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard3 AT earthlink.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] David's article
  • Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:42:27 -0500

Dear list,

David was kind enough to send me the articles that he mentioned. The one by Müller apparently refutes Barr's idea that the definite article has no necessary connection to definiteness. Barr's idea seems illogical because of the opposition with the absence of the article, that absence occurring in indefinite situations. The other article, by Ehrensvärd, attempts to refute the 67 cases that have been used to establish this category of usage of the definite article to indicate something present to the mind but without more specific particularization. He begins by trying to refute the example of "one who had escaped" in Gen 14:13. The author presents the novel idea that HPL+ refers to a group of people, all those in Sodom who escaped by way of the tar pits and did not fall in but escaped to the hills (Gen 14:10). Thus he understands it to mean "those who escaped."

I find some objections to this understanding of the Hebrew term. First, readers have uniformly understood this person as an individual. Second in other places where the phrase occurs in the Bible, translators have universally understood it of an individual:

Ezek. 24:26 on that day, one who has escaped will come to you to report to you the news.
Ezek. 24:27 On that day your mouth shall be opened to the one who has escaped, and you shall speak and no longer be silent. So you shall be a sign to them; and they shall know that I am the LORD.
Ezek. 33:21 ¶ In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth day of the month, someone who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, “The city has fallen.”
Ezek. 33:22 Now the hand of the LORD had been upon me the evening before the fugitive came; but he had opened my mouth by the time the fugitive came to me in the morning; so my mouth was opened, and I was no longer unable to speak.

Third, why would every single escapee come a good distance to Abraham's tent-dwelling? How is it that these people who fled for their lives to the mountains all managed to come together, know who Abraham was and where he lived, agree on the idea of going to Abraham (for help?), and carry it out? It's much easier to think of one escapee happening to come there by accident. We have no knowledge that Abraham ever went to Sodom, or that Lot ever told the Sodomites about Abraham.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard





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