Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

What you describe was called by Thomas Gold the “herd mentality”
whereby a person outside the mainstream would not only not get a
hearing, he could actually jeopardize his job. In the past, many of
the major discoveries have been made by people outside of the
mainstream. Today they often can not get a hearing.

A second issue is definitions. When people refer to “science”, most
moderns assume a definition connected to modern empirical studies,
e.g. physics, chemistry, etc., and not just a reference to a classical
understanding of what can be known. From this posting, I understand
that you refer to the classical definition of what can be known, while
as far as I understand, Yitzhak Sapir, some others on this list and I
understand “science” as referring to empirical science. That modern
definition comprises only a subset of what can be known. And that
subset cannot include the past.

Then there is a final issue: in reading a history of science, I found
that there was a classical definition that the statements of the
“experts” were treated as more important than modern observations. The
rise of empirical science did away with that practice. The modern
practice started in theology, then spread to all areas of study,
including history. But now we are in the post modern era, which seems
to be returning to the pre-modern practice where experts, just because
they are “experts”, are to be considered authoritative. Both you and I
disagree with this post modern practice.

Within Hebrew studies, my main area of study has been lexicography. I
found that the main giants of lexicography (Gesenius and his
disciples, most famously BDB) were crippled, crippled by practices I
had found invalid when working with modern languages. In fact, it was
that recognition that led me to analyze the meanings of words on my
own. And that recognition was based on the fact that I had read Tanakh
through several times and found more and more often that the
definitions I was finding in the dictionaries did not match the
contexts I was reading.

In closing, don’t worry about being called a hypocrite. If you are on
the bleeding edge of research, there are times you have to backtrack
and start over again, which means you will not be 100% consistent in
all that you say and do.

Karl W. Randolph.