Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Dec 16, 2007 10:21 AM, kenneth greifer wrote:
>
> Sorry, I have one more wild guess about Ecclesiastes 7:7-8.

There is no reason to say "sorry" for suggesting a wild guess about
the interpretation of
a Biblical passage, and it is not "unscholarly" to do so.  We are not
living in the same
culture as the authors of the Biblical passages and it takes a certain
amount of creativity
and imagination to sometimes suggest what might have been their
intention.  It is only
that once the idea is proposed it must stand up to as rigorous a
vetting process as is
possible.  If it doesn't, it's best to be dropped -- you obviously had
several different ideas
today, and so there's no shortage of good creative ideas.  The goal is
to concentrate on
those that stand up to criticism.  Of course, you won't know if the
idea stands up to
criticism, if you don't propose it in the first place so that it may
be criticized.  So
proposing the idea is not unscholarly.  In fact, it is the key to
scholarship, and without
creativeness and ideas, there can be no scholarship.

> Sorry again.

So don't say sorry.  We should say thanks.

Yitzhak Sapir