Biblical Hebrew Forum

["biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>]

Hi again Jim,

I think this is going to be the last time that I am going to attempt to get
a reasonable response from you. I have tried to be open minded about your
suggestions and have even attempted to help you make your propositions more
well founded. You come to us and demand that we be open minded about your
suggestions and consider the evidence and many people on this list have
attempted to do just that. However, if you wish to be respected you also
need to demonstrate the same open mindedness and show that you are willing
to look at the data and accept where you could be potentially wrong. I am
therefore going to give you one last chance at salvaging any respect I may
have had in considering your method of reasoning by seeing how you respond
to the following questions.

1) Please read carefully Genesis 20:2,3 very carefully:

2 And Abraham repeated concerning Sarah his wife: "She is my sister." With
that A·bim´e·lech king of Ge´rar sent and took Sarah. 3 Afterward God came
to A·bim´e·lech in a dream by night and said to him: "Here you are as good
as dead because of the woman whom you have taken, since she is owned by
another owner as his wife."

do you or do you not accept that the text makes no mention of Abimelech
getting up and saying that this happened but that the text merely represents
this as a series of events? A simple Yes or No will do! Please don't respond
with long repetitions of things you have already said but do not answer the
question.

2) Based on your answer (which I strongly hope to be a Yes) do you or do you
not accept that you reading into the text concepts which are not explicitly
there? Again, a simple Yes or No will do.

3) Please read carefully Genesis 12:10-13

10 Now a famine arose in the land and A´bram made his way down toward Egypt
to reside there as an alien, because the famine was severe in the land. 11 And
it came about that as soon as he got near to entering Egypt, then he said to
Sar´ai his wife: "Please, now! I well know you are a woman beautiful in
appearance. 12 So it is bound to happen that the Egyptians will see you and
will say, 'This is his wife.' And they will certainly kill me, but you they
will preserve alive. 13 Please say you are my sister, in order that it may
go well with me on your account, and my soul will be certain to live due to
you."


Do you or do you not acknowledge that the narrator explicitly quotes Abraham
as explicitly stating his reasons being that Sarah is beautiful and that he
fears for his life? Again, a simple Yes or No will do? I am not interested
in how you 'feel' the narrator intends us to understand this because your
'feelings' are little in the way of primary source evidence.


4) Based on your answer (which I sincerely hope to be a sane Yes) do you or
do you not acknowledge that you are forcing an understanding that Pharoah
did not desire Sarah into the next which is simply not explicitly there?
Again, a simple Yes or No will do. Reading your long posts which do not
answer the questions but merely reiterate things you have already said is
becoming extremely tiresome.

In short, I am looking for four yes or no answers to four simple questions.
If you must insist on repeating long explanations of things I have already
read and wasting even more of readers time could you at least highlight
where the desired Yes/No answers are so that readers who have a life beyond
b-hebrew can skip to the beef.

Thank you.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       Thesis 1 - Aleppo codex machine translation
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  Thesis 2 - language acquisition simulation