Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Stephen:

What we have is a person who wants to rewrite history to fit his personal
theories.

The source of the English term is recognizable to a seafaring people. The
waves roll, are in motion—so when hills are viewed that appear similar to
waves, the similarity is noted. But the ancient Semites for the most part
were land people, would they have noted the similarity to waves? I doubt it.

He refuses to acknowledge that ancient Canaan included a southern area that
was a fertile savanna, where grain crops could be grown. Historical
references date from the Early Bronze Age when Abraham lived, to as late as
the seventh century BC Iron Age. He wants to relocate the Early Bronze Age
town of Gerer, that apparently was destroyed sometime between when the
Patriarchs lived and the invasion of Canaan under Joshua, from that fertile
south to upper Galilee.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Stephen and Rebecca Shead <
srshead AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Good question, Stoney, I asked myself exactly the same thing. In Spanish
> you
> would say "undulating hills" (colinas ondulantes).
>
> And a follow-up for Jim Stinehart: Do you realise how much of a semantic
> leap is required to get from the verb "roll" to the idiom "rolling hills"?
> It is by no means an obvious metaphor - I'd be very surprised if it was
> particularly common cross-linguistically. "Undulating hills" seems far more
> obvious to me, and more likely to be prevalent cross-linguistically. "Roll"
> is a type of movement associated with round objects, and whatever hills do,
> they do not "roll"! They don't even looking like a rolling thing. But when
> you scan your eyes along hills of a certain kind, it does look like they
> "go
> up and down" - a very different type of movement.
>
> Now it's not too hard to imagine how the English idiom might have arisen.
> But my point is that it is actually a very strange expression. So EVEN IF
> all your other linguistic arguments about GRR, GLL, GRGR, GLGL and GLYL
> hold
> water (and I'm not going to go there at this stage), a semantic connection
> "GRR roll --> the rolling hills" seems very unlikely to me, and it's
> certainly not a strong linguistic argument unless there's evidence for the
> metaphor somewhere else.
>
> Stephen Shead
> Santiago, Chile
>
>