Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

>
> This position seems odd to me.  Why do they rule out translations to
> Greek and Aramaic which were done
> by native speakers of the language, and which provide us first hand
> knowledge of each verb (well, with
> the exceptions of such textual issues as noted previously) and the way
> the native speakers understood
> those verbs.


Native speakers of which language?

We’ve already hashed out this question, so there’s no reason to hash it out
again. But there is evidence that Hebrew had ceased to be a natively spoken
language during the Babylonian Exile or shortly thereafter, it had been
replace by Aramaic and in Hellenistic areas by Greek. There is evidence from
the LXX that at that time certain terms in Hebrew had been forgotten and
that the translators were merely guessing.

I merely mention this because the evidence is not enough to be proof. This
is why some of us rule out the use of translations as being more than just
advisory.

I’ve made my point, let’s just agree to disagree.

Karl W. Randolph.