Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 2:58 AM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:08 PM, K Randolph wrote:
>
> >> Here, several problems or mistakes. First, there does not appear to be
> >> an answer
> >> or even a willingness to learn.
> >>
> >
> > There are three problems with this statement:
> >
> > 1) You took my statement out of context, which included the reason for
> the
> > question.
> > 2) You didn’t answer my question.
> > 3) I don’t have ready access to those books. They are most likely in a
> > library in another town a couple of hours away, one way, but I don’t want
> to
> > take a day off just to find out if they are worth the effort.
> >
> > This third point has been a sore point on this list, as people will
> > reference books and articles, and simply assume that everyone has access
> to
> > those works, when that is often not the case.
>
> No, Karl, you are just unwilling to learn.  Even when I provided you
> with links to
> full texts available online for free you refused to go and look at
> them.  This has
> been the real sore point on this list -- you refuse to accept evidence at
> almost
> all costs.
>

I have access to some documents through our local library, and have made use
of that. Among those are the JSTOR articles, which are restricted and not
everyone on this list has access to those articles. There was one case in a
discussion on this list where you referenced an article, I read it, only to
find out that you hadn’t read it yet.

Do I always cite those articles later in these discussions? Not if they have
nothing to add to what has already been discussed. So my question here was,
in its context, will these books have anything to add to the discussion
beyond what was already discussed, enough that it will be worth taking over
half a day to go and look them up?

I detect more than a whiff of “willingness to learn” = “coming to agree with
me”. That’s not how scholarship works. Sometimes what is convincing proof to
one person, will be considered by another as no more than whistling in the
dark. Likewise, some of the articles and books that you referenced, I found
not even worth citing in my responses on this list.

>
> In this case, you have not shown the Masoretic pointing to be incorrect.
> You
> have shown that in some cases, without the Masoretic pointing, the reading
> could be ambiguous.  That is not really earth shattering news.
>

A while back I gave the example of Proverbs 1:19, where it is clear that the
pointing is wrong. That evidence took a few paragraphs to demonstrate.

A couple of years ago I mentioned Isaiah 30:14 where several wrong points
obscured the picture of a blacksmith’s smithy. There I considered the
experience of having wielded a hammer in a smithy as giving as much insight
into the unpointed text as the arguments of people who had only linguistic
arguments to counter that experience.

I stopped using the Masoretic points years before I joined this list, and
since I was reading for one audience, namely myself only, I saw no reason at
that time to write out a list of wrong points, along with a paragraph or two
to show why those points were wrong. I can’t remember when was the last time
I looked at the points, so as I read, I don’t know where I agree nor
disagree with the points.

>
> I doubt you really have cases where you see the Masoretic pointing is
> wrong.
> Even now, Randall gave you an example of unpointed Hebrew and you seem
> unable to find the infinitive (nslwx).  This is very suggestive that
> you do not have
> the necessary expertise in reading unpointed Hebrew to be able to consider
> all reading possibilities.
>

Look at your statement a couple of paragraphs above, namely that without
points that the text is sometimes ambiguous. What was the complete context
of that quote? I read the short quote as an imperative statement.
Morphologically that is a possible reading. And when a statement is
imperative, one expects that the verb contained in that statement to be
imperative as well, even in Biblical Hebrew.

>
> When Randall quotes standard grammars he is not making an appeal to
> authority.  Any serious student of Hebrew should be expected to be able to
> follow up standard common grammars.  In this case one grammar (Gesenius)
> is available completely online,


OK, where? Give the URL. Does it include the page numbers, so that when a
citation is given, that we can go directly to the citation?


> and the other (Muraoka) is available for google
> preview.


Again give the URL. A second question, the google previews lack pages, are
the relevant pages part of the preview?


>  In medicine, a doctor who does not look up other current views
> before forming his final opinion would be guilty of criminal negligence.
>  But
> then, this is not life and death, -- it is just the Bible, right?
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
>
> Gesenius is hardly current … ;-)

Seriously, in a discussion, if the documents are on line, give the URLs,
that’s the same as quoting them. Before your message, I knew these documents
only as dead tree products. I still don’t know the URLs, so it would be a
help if you could supply them.

Karl W. Randolph.