Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Ktiva & Kria

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ktiva & Kria
  • Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 19:02:33 +0100

Dear Yitzhak,

(1) In my answer to Karl on November 2, I tell about other solutions of this particular discrepancy, the one suggested by you in (1) included. My interest was to give voice to a particular Rabbinical tradition I have found other day fascinating. You will find in the below page of researchers from Bar Ilan another case of Rabbinical incursion into Mathematics:

http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/vayakhel/zag.html

The same people have published an article on similar cases in a magazine on the History of Mathematics; the references could be found on their personal sites.

(2) This opinion is not universally accepted.

(3) I will follow the references you suggest, thanks.

(4) The identification of letters of the Hebrew alphabet with numbers is very old, going back to pre-Davidic period: just look at the series of David's psalms which are alphabetic acrostics; by the way, the word "acrostic" being of Greek origins, it does not mean that the Greeks invented this poetical genre.
In any case, I will follow the references you suggest, too.

Thanks a lot,

Edward

On Nov 2, 2007 5:22 AM, Edward Belaga wrote:> In my article "On The Rabbinical Exegesis of an Enhanced Biblical> Value of Pi" is presented and discussed a certain tradition of reading> into the discrepancy of Ktiva (written form of the Massoretic text)> and Kria (its reading tradition) of a verse from Tanakh.>> (Could be found in many places; in the HTML format, for example, on the site>> http://www.math.ubc.ca/people/faculty/israel/bpi/bpi.html>> an independent critical account in a mathematical magazine could be> found on the site>> www.m-a.org.uk/docs/library/2063.pdf)>> Does anybody know other cases of such reading leading to conclusions,> already published or eventual, of a universal cultural interest ?
1) A much more simpler solution is rounding off. If the measurement of thediameter was not exactly 10 arms but almost, say, around 9.6 arms, thena rounded off diameter would still read 10 arms, but the rounded offcircumference would be 30.
2) In general, in cases of kativ and qari the qari likely represents a laterreading. That is, in some cases, the Hebrew of the Bible, perhaps becauseof shifting semantics and orthographies, was felt to be wrong -- but thescribes were unwilling to change the written text. They therefore read itdifferently according to their understanding even though it was written insome specific way. Alternatively, and maybe even more widespread, isthe use of kativ and qari to deal with alternate versions of the text. Thereading tradition having come from a slightly different version of the textthan the writing tradition that prevailed. For more about this you can readthe appropriate section in Emanuel Tov's "Introduction to TextualCriticism" (perhaps in English it is called "Textual Criticism of the OldTestament")
3) Maimon Cohen suggests that these are two allomorphs of the sameword, comparable to dɔg and dɔgɔ ("fish") or rɔ( and rɔ(ɔ ("evil") that wereused interchangeably, and possibly, in Second Temple period times, theshorter form became more acceptable.
4) The modern system of Gematria is based on the Greek system. Inall likelihood it dates from Greek and later times, as the name implies,and as the system needs the final version of the mncpk letters to denoteall numbers up to a 1000, and these developed only in the Second Templeperiod Aramaic script. An earlier system may have simply given the lettersnumbers from 1 to 22. You can read about this here:http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/SNHIG.htmland in the criticism (section B) of Bar Ilan's review here:http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~testsm/elior.html
Yitzhak Sapir_______________________________________________b-hebrew mailing listb-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.orghttp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew




Edward G. Belaga
******************************************************
Institut de Recherche en Mathématique Avancée
Universite Louis Pasteur
7, rue René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
tel.: 333 90 24 02 35, FAX: 333 90 24 03 28
e-mail : edward.belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
******************************************************


----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page