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  • From: belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards - the problems of emergence
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 05:06:02 +0200

Your mail raises implicitly the problem of an eventual relationship between two mysteries of emergence -- of the language and of the Hebrew Bible. It is a facinating stuff and, personally, I belive that it is a very promising venue. The following article of mine should be viewed as just a first messenger of the eventual reality of such a connection:

fccl.ksu.ru/issue10/BelagaLinguaInTheBeginning_080324.pdf

(Sorry for the double posting, if it would be the case.)

EB

Quoting Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>:

Moderators,

You got rid of Jim for making too many tenuous assumptions. (Also he
tended to give bogus etymologies in order to identify certain Hebrew and
Egyptian place-names.) His theory was that Ezra altered the text to turn
northern references into southern ones. (Not something wildly
implausible on its face, just lacking in evidence.)

What replaced Jim's theory as the dominant topic of the list was a
theory saying that Genesis was written by many of the characters who
appear in it, beginning with Adam (or, excuse me, with God). I don't
think I need to start listing the hundreds of tenuous assumptions
involved in this hypothesis, but they must include a very young earth,
an incredibly fast spread and differentiation of human populations and
cultures, and Hebrew as the mother of all languages. Even if I gave up
all of modern science, the theory would still involve an incredibly
implausible (to me) idea about how the documents were transmitted and
edited. In particular, the assertions about how certain sections
represent the point of view of Shem, Terah, et.al. strike me as absurd.

So I am wondering what the criteria are here. Is Karl's theory germane
to the list because it is somehow tied to the word TWLDWT ? It seems to
me to run much further afield (of BH) than Jim's analysis of
place-names, and its supposed connection to Mesopotamian literary forms
is at least as weak as Jim's use of Egyptian documents.

By the way, I'm not trying to limit the list to its "true purposes".
Everybody has their own purposes, and I assume that interest in BH is
almost always motivated by one's attitude toward the Bible as a unique
and special book. Thus I don't think that you can separate questions
about BH from questions about the history of the text. (Karl often
asserts that you can, and that the list must adhere to language
questions, but here we see him breaking his own rule.)
My gripe is just that I see you guys upholding various standards of
scholarship, and then in some cases throwing them out the window. Which,
IMHO, is what you have to do in order to seriously discuss theories
ascribing authorship to legendary characters like Adam and Noah. Or am I
missing something?


Gabe Eisenstein
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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
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