Biblical Hebrew Forum

[belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr]

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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> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://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
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