Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Harold Holmyard <hholmyard3 AT earthlink.net>]

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