Biblical Hebrew Forum

[John Estell <oldearther AT yahoo.com>]

Bill,

"If you wanted to measure the distance to the horizon, restricting yourself 
to their tools and world view, you
could not do it. It is always further away."
 
Indeed, which is why it makes sense to think of olam as conveying the notion 
of time continuing beyond all measure.

John Estell






 



________________________________
From: Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>
To: b-hebrew@lists..ibiblio.org
Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 7:31:06 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: barak (bless? curse?) in the Book of Job

John wrote:

>I'm not talking about the mathematical notion of infinity. I'm simply
>talking about the idea of time continuing forever.

Yes, I did understand that point. It is hard for us to get to grips
with what ancient people understood at times. I said in conclusion
``(WLM cannot be taken to mean an infinite amount of time, just
indefinitely long.'' The difficult part is to understand how something
could not be finite yet not infinite. So when you asked

>So you wouldn't consider "infinite time" to mean
>something opposite of "finite time"???

In one sense, sure, the opposite of finite time is infinite time
but that doesn't do justice to what the Hebrews understood. If
I may be permitted to make another detour to the Greeks, Euclid
proved (in our language) that there were an infinite number
of primes. But the question is -- what did Euclid understand
by his proof? That's really hard to say because to us we are
no longer grappling with understanding infinities. We throw
infinities around with gleeful abandon without giving them a second
thought. How could he frame a proof in which infinity makes an
appearance and yet not only not understand infinity but have no
concept of infinity?

So when considering what (WLM might mean, we can take
the easy way out and just take it to mean infinite time or eternity
or forever of something similar when it seems that's what's meant.
But there's the problem -- their way of thinking is so different
to ours we may not really understand what they were saying at all.
I have read somewhere, the source eludes me, that way back it meant
``to the horizon''. If you wanted to measure the distance to the
horizon, restricting yourself to their tools and world view, you
could not do it. It is always further away.

I hope that clarifies rather than confuses.

Bill Rea, Ph.D. ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
E-Mail bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz                      </  New
Phone 64-3-364-2331, Fax  64-3-364-2332              /)  Zealand
Unix Systems Administrator                          (/'



>From kwrandolph AT gmail.com  Mon Feb  2 19:51:00 2009
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Lloyd:
As is stated on the front page of this forum, and as George Athas
reiterated, this forum is concerning Biblical Hebrew language and
literature. It is based on the scholarly principles of evidence and logic.

There are those on this list who say that theory apart from evidence, is the
same as preaching a religious belief. For evidence, they will accept a
large, datable body of literature in the Biblical Hebrew language so we can
compare the stylistic development of the language and literature, and/or
manuscript evidence showing earlier versions of the texts in question.
Nothing less. Unfortunately, neither exist. Therefore any theory concerning
the history of the Tanakh prior to the DSS is merely a statement of belief.
To push any one of those beliefs is proselytism and has been deemed off
topic for this list.

Questions in Pentateuchal studies that postulate a J, E, P or any other such
source hypothesis, because they have no evidence, are pushing beliefs. Those
are the little questions that are irrelevant.

But there is still plenty to discuss: vocabulary, grammar, linguistic
conventions, euphemisms, a whole slew of questions. You are quite welcome to
join in on those discussions.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 12:42 PM, LM Barre <l_barre AT yahoo.com> wrote:

> I simply wished to say that my particular brand of scholarship is of 1986
> vintage, at which time I received my doctorate.  We were asking the big
> questions.  Pentateuchal studies was divided into studies of J, E and P.  We
> were also working on the Deuteronomistic Historian and the Deuteronomic
> school.  In fact, there was intense interests in all the biblical
> literature--wisdom literature, hymnic literature, post-exilic literature.
> Methodology was discussed--form criticism, tradition history, source
> criticism, rhetorical criticism and so on.  In this sense, then, I am a
> traditionalist who is out of step with what largely goes on here at
> b-Hebrew.  I do not understand what the task is here.  Can someone speak to
> what is going on here?  It eludes me.
>
>
> Lloyd Barré
> http://freewebs.com/lmbarre
>