Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Hello Steve,

You might want to know that your article can be read online:
http://www.jtsa.edu/Documents/pagedocs/JANES/2009/Berlant_JANES31.pdf

Stephen, I'm happy to see that you publish your work in respectable journals.
However, I think you underestimate the failures of your theory.  I
think that your
theory qualifies as idiosyncratic.  But regardless of this opinion,
what I said about
t' and t ("teth and taw") -- the data in question -- is not misplaced
at all.  It is not
just my "opinion" that t' ("teth") and t ("taw") were not reflexes of
each other.  It is
evident from the data.  They were not confused in antiquity, nor in
Arabic today.
Even in modern Hebrew, where they carry the same sound they are not likely to
be confused because the meanings are clear and distinct in the various roots.

So I do not have a misplaced sense of certainty.  If anything, I
apparently didn't
convey the certainty explicitly enough.  When you originally brought the
question up, you asked for anyone who could support or refute your thesis,
and for anyone who could provide pro's and con's.  I know it must be hard to
see that there is such a big con to your theory, one that clearly refutes it.
The appropriate response, however, is to move on, to find another innovative
idea and test it out.  Debating its validity places you in the same square as
those in this list who simply won't let the evidence stand in their
way.  A good
innovative scholar will have many ideas, but he will be able to execute the
process of sifting out the impracticable ideas from the successful ones.  It 
is
the ability to continuously sift out bad ideas, that fall even only
after much energy
was placed into the research of the idea that leaves only the gems standing 
out
in the end.

There is something else that somewhat bothers me in your response:

> In any case, clearly related to ptr is also pthr,
> most notably in Pethor the birthplace of Balaam,
> the seer that Numbers 22-24 and Deuteronomy 23:4

The word in Hebrew, however, is not pthr, but ptr.  This should be clear to
anyone who read the Hebrew text.   The -h- in the scholar's quote of the
place name is the normal fricative pronunciation that normally follows a
vowel.  Comparative linguistics cannot be done without being familiar with
the source languages.  In this case, the understanding of the spirantization
of the bgdkpt letters in Hebrew, and the difference between emphatics
and non-emphatics.

Yitzhak Sapir