Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi Yitzhak,

Yigal said we good get back to this after a cooling off period. The
epigraphy thread is dead and I've been waiting for a long time for a
response from you here. You don't seem to be willing to acknowledge that you
have no basis for your formulaic understanding and that if we were to apply
a formulaic understanding to its fullest extent then that would make Zibeon
Esau's wife.

James Christian

On 18 May 2010 12:45, James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com> wrote:

> Yitzhak,
>
> you're logic is completely self contradictory. If you are to insist that
> the second bath is talking about Anah then by the same token you would have
> to insist that Zibeon was Esau's wife. Your understanding contradicts the
> wider context of 10 verses later. You seem to be grasping at straws and it's
> not doing you any favours. It's making you look completely incompetent and
> lacking in a basic understanding of Hebrew.
>
> The LXX is evidently a bad translation here. The clause continues to supply
> additional information about Oholibamah. She is the focus throughout the
> clause. To change the focus from Oholibamah to Anah back to Oholibamah
> breaks the natural semantic logic of the phrase. The Vulgate corrects the
> LXX mistake and goes back to the original Hebrew. I have no idea why the LXX
> contains such an elementary mistake. Presumably the translators Hebrew was
> good enough. I would suggest the best bet is that they were either working
> with a corrupt text with BN in place of BT or being in a hurry and knowing
> Anah to be a bloke didn't read the text carefully and translated as uios.
>
> James Christian
>
>
> On 18 May 2010 04:00, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:31 AM, James Christian wrote:
>> > May I also note that your failure to spot this kind of undermines your
>> > position that reading unpointed text won't lead to better instincts.
>> Your
>> > reliance on cantilation marks certainly didn't seem to help you work
>> this
>> > one out.
>> > James Christian
>>
>> James, I don't need to rely on cantillation marks.  But I wondered if
>> there was
>> some effort at disambiguation there.  Yes, in this case there can only
>> be a strict
>> reading of this verse.  BT may mean "granddaughter" but its antecedent
>> in such a chain can only be the last person mentioned.  The Septuagint
>> reads
>> BN in this place in Gen 36:2 and 36:14, and also reads (ONAN in 36:24,
>> so evidently readers at the time of the Septuagint also had an issue with
>> this second BT.  The Septuagint apparently shows us traditions that
>> identified
>> (NH of 36:2 and 36:14 as a different person from 36:24 (ONAN on the one
>> hand, conflated with traditions that fixed the reading of 36:2 and 36:14
>> to
>> read BN.  (NH has a qamats-he ending so it does stand as a feminine
>> sounding name.  In any case, at the end, such a common expression for
>> genealogy cannot stand as ambiguous.  So many times does the Bible
>> use it for identification of people, and this reasonably reflects the
>> situation
>> in the community as well, where the heritage was used in place of
>> surnames,
>> that it is unreasonable to read the second BT as referring to Oholibamah.
>> Furthermore, the author had an easy way to tell us that Oholibamah was
>> Ziv(on's granddaughter --he could have used BN!  Why then did he use
>> BT here but in other genealogies of this form used BN?  Why does the
>> Septuagint read BN not BT?  The only way this could be interpreted in
>> Hebrew is that (ANAH, according to verses 2 and 14, was a girl.  Yes, it
>> is inconsistent with 36:24.  That we see that there were various attempts
>> (as in the Septuagint) to deal with the issue, only reinforces that this
>> was
>> a valid issue for the native Hebrew speakers during Second Temple period
>> times.  From a textual critical perspective, all else being equal, we
>> would
>> choose the reading BT because it is the more difficult reading -- lectio
>> difficilior.  One possible explanation would be that the two verses are
>> from
>> different genealogies in different sources.
>>
>> Regarding )$T, that would not necessarily have as antecedent Ziv(on.
>>  Primarily,
>> unlike the case of BT, there is no simple way for the author to
>> disambiguate
>> Ziv(on as the wife from Oholibamah as the wife.  Furthermore, by the time
>> we
>> read about Ziv(on we already know that it is Oholibamah that is the wife
>> from
>> earlier verses.  In contrast, when we read the series of BT in
>> 36:2/14, this is not
>> yet known to us.  This is why a native reader would have understood that
>> it is
>> Oholibamah that is the wife, but that in 36:2, and 14, (anah is a
>> daughter.
>>
>> So yes, context is helpful, but not very much here.  Here context would
>> lead you
>> to recognize an inconsistency, but Hebrew usage would prevent you from
>> forcing
>> the interpretation BT = reference to Oholibamah.
>>
>> Yitzhak Sapir
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