Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Yitzhak,

the reason I haven't responded to your response of a yodh suggestion is
because, to this very moment, I am still scratching my head in wonder as to
why you think your response is relevant to a practice of being lazy and
missing out the Yohds in gentilics.

Further, things come in and out of fashion. You seem to be assuming that
there was a post-exilic period that Yodhs were used and that before that
they were never *ever* used in gentilics.

Just when the consonantal sequence of the Torah was considered holy we don't
know with certainty. What we do know is that the internal evidence claims
that Joshua made himself a copy and every king had to make himself a copy.
We know that familiarity with the Torah and the teaching of it to his wife
and children was a basic responsibility of each and every family head.

The data you are referring to is associated with so many variables that it
is impossible for me to give you any firm answers at this stage Yitzhak. So
many questions need answering before this data can be interpretted properly.
Who wrote the inscriptions? In what language? What association, if any, did
they have with Yhwh's people? What association, if any, did they have with
scribes of the Torah and other holy writings?

The more I speak to you on this subject the more it seems to me that you
seem to be unaware of the amount of inscriptional data from each region we
would need to have in order to even begin to be able to answer these
questions objectively.

As far as I can see we have good reason to believe that the Siloam
inscription was written in Judean Jerusalem Hebrew in the period of King
Hezekiah. The Lachish letters may have been written in some form of outskirt
Judean Hebrew in the time just before the completion of the conquest of the
Babylonians. Both of these seem to be fairly official in nature. In any
case, it seems to be a good start that you are focusing on these because we
have good reason to believe they were written in Judaic Hebrew. However,
that really doesn't strike me as a lot of data by any measure.

I really think the only sensible way forward for this discussion Yitzhak is
that you present each inscription to us so that we can together assess the
language it was written in and whether we can sensibly include it in a
corpus of pre-exilic inscriptional Hebrew. Telling people to go to the
library isn't going to advance your cause in any way. It's just going to
delay further fruitful discussion.

I won't be insisting at this stage that you provide photographic evidence of
the inscriptional data you are referring to but it would be nice to know
what beyond these two artefacts you are including in your corpus of
pre-exile Judean Hebrew.

James Christian



On 26 May 2010 01:34, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 10:34 PM, James Christian wrote:
> > Yitzhak,
> > most of what you just said was about missing superfluous yodhs in
> > inscriptions. Yet you outright rejected that inscribers may not have
> wanted
> > to spend extra time and space carving out a consonant that wasn't really
> > even needed. In terms of percentages of your data I'm guessing that a
> large
> > percentage can be explained by superfluous yodhs right?
>
> James, I rejected it on the basis of evidence.  You are welcome to offer a
> rebuttal.  Lachish 3 is a very touching letter and has implications for
> scribal
> activity and literacy.  As such it is one of the few inscriptions
> available on the
> web.  Here -
>
> http://www.kchanson.com/ancdocs/westsem/lachish3.html
>
> I think the image of the ostracon is available on Inscriptifact.
>
> In any case, how do you conclude a yodh is superfluous.  How do you explain
> the
> difference between אש in Siloam and איש in the Bible?  Do you also read it
> as
> fire in the following sentence (as Karl suggested):
>
> ובים הנקבה הכו החצבם אש לקרת רעו גרזן על [ג]רזן
>
> generally translated as: "And on n the day it was pierced, the diggers
> hit, each
> one  toward his peer(s), the axe upon the axe"
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
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