Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Karl,
>
> Your message implies I'm a theologian.


No, the opposite is meant, namely there are theologians who have adopted the
same ideology that you espouse.


>  Please do not label me or address me as such.
>

I didn’t.


> In any case, suppose to take your example, that a wife refers to her
> neighbor's husband.…
>

This was merely an example of how languages work, not an attempt at an exact
equivalent. You are acting like a theologian.

>
> In this case, there is widespread evidence from ancient witness texts
> that the original reading
> was "bny )l" or "bny )lhym".  The question is what to do with this.
> According to Canaanite
> myth, the god El had seventy children gods, and to each a different
> inheritance was allocated.
>
> We now ask: at the time the poem was composed, what was the world-view
> of the author?
>

Exactly. And for that we need to read the context of the book itself. That
context includes Deuteronomy 6:4. The immediate context of the book
overrides any context from a broader culture not shared by the author.

As for borrowing literary styles, that has nothing to do with adopting
ideologies. One can even adopt figures of speech, as culturally understood
metaphors, without it meaning that a belief has been accepted.


> …You might similarly claim that the same author wrote the entire Torah
> and the poem, and
> therefore it is legitimate to throw the general world-view of the
> Torah upon the poem.  But this
> claim deserves proof.


The evidence is given in the text itself, therefore it is incumbent on those
who question the text to give the proof as to why we should not accept the
text. This is a theological argument that you give.


> …
> Together, all these negatives make for a very strong positive: yes,
> the song's natural simple
> meaning is polytheistic, and it is simply its position in a text with
> a very different world-view,
> that prevents us from seeing it.
>

This is an admission on your part that the context clearly influences how we
read it. In other words, all of your arguments claiming that this is a
polytheistic or henotheistic poem hinge on context. In order for your
argument to stand, you need to take it out of its context, where it is
found, and put it into a foreign context. “That dog don’t hunt.”

>
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
>
> Karl W. Randolph.