Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Please continue!

James Christian

On 17 May 2010 10:29, Ishinan <ishinan AT comcast.net> wrote:

>
> Previously [JIM STINEHART] wrote:
>
> " To my assertion that "Seir" literally means "hairy", and hence "
> well-wooded", you responded:  "No, it does not. That is a fairy tale that
> you  made up."
>
> I did not make that up.  I'm quoting BDB:  "the 'hairy', i.e. 'well-wooded
> '. Cf. [the Arabic word for] trees".  A site on the Internet gives the
> following Arabic for tree and trees:  "Tree = shajra;  Trees = shajar".  I
> also quoted Gesenius, who sees Seir as meaning "clothed, and, as it were,
> bristled with trees and thick woods".
>
> So I most definitely did not "make it up".  Many analysts see %(YR as
> meaning "well-wooded".  Historically, the area south of the Dead Sea was
> never "  well-wooded".  But in Biblical times, the hill country of the
> Transjordan  was definitely "well-wooded".  The facts are all on my side,
> as
> usual.  You  can call my marshalling of objective facts "a fairy tale", but
> that's the identical lingo that the Biblical Minimalists use to
> characterize
> the Patriarchal narratives as a whole."
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> [GEORGE ATHAS] - Where do you possibly see ???? meaning 'forest'? You
> simply
> have not nailed this down. There is a big difference between 'hair' and
> 'wooded forest'. Until you can produce a firm linguistic connection there,
> you are either speculating at best, or just making it up. Either way,
> that's
> NOT GOOD METHOD! If you were doing a research degree, you'd be panned by
> your supervisor for this and sent back to do some basic linguistics.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [ISHINAN]- George, I thought the thread of this topic was officially
> closed.
> However, since you reopened it, I have to express my disagreement with your
> assessment of Jim's etymology of   ????
>
> The accusations leveled at Jim on THIS particular point, in my opinion, do
> not hold water. I personally checked his assertion and this is what I
> found.
>
> Based on Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon p. 973,  cf. Arabic
> cognate expressed is sha`Ar (with medial `ayn). It has the sense of tangled
> and/or dense trees, which Jim correctly interpreted as a forest. I am
> sending to both you and Jim, a JPEG with the pertinent etymologies from
> both
> Hebrew BDB and Arabic (Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, vol.
> ii, p. 1561) dictionaries side by side. In this respect, Jim's
> interpretation on this issue is technically sound.
>
> However, in his assertion, Jim made two minute mistakes.  First, he
> neglected to give the page # of the entry in the BDB.  Secondly, in his
> Internet search of the Arabic example, he used an Arabic synonym, shajar or
> trees (written with a medial Jiym), instead of sha`Ar (dense tangled trees;
> written with a medial `ayn) as mentioned in Brown-Driver-Briggs.  Since the
> internet is notoriously famous for being imprecise therefore it is always
> advisable to go back to library references to double check the information.
>
> Bear in mind, I personally have a totally different interpretation in mind
> for "seir", based on Sa?adiah ben Yosef Gaon's survived Arabic translation
> of the Old Testament  ??????? ??????? ?????? ????? ???????.
>
> Sa?adiah's Arabic translation of the Bible is of a great importance as a
> means of religious enlightenment. His system of hermeneutics was not
> limited
> to the exegesis of individual passages, but treated each book of the Bible
> as a whole. In this respect, his translation takes a prominent place
> besides
> the Greek Bible-translation of antiquity and emerges as a valuable tool for
> comparison, though seldom made us of by modern Hebrew scholars.
>
> But this would be a different topic of conversation.
>
> Best regards to both of you.
>
> Ishinan Ishibashi
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>