Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Isaac:

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:

> You are right. It is, indeed, true that you may not "need" my suggested
> equivalence of IWAH עוה and IBAH עבה, all you ("you" in the general sense)
> need to do is to look up IWAH in an English-Hebrew dictionary (say that of
> Gesenius) and see that IWAH is 'overturning', then apply your understanding
> of 'overturning' to the Hebrew text.


So what does being perverted have with being stout? It is your claim that
they are equivalent, so please explain.


> Human nature and experience is sufficiently universal so that to every
> Hebrew word there corresponds (a peu pres, because meaning is extensive) an
> English word, and vise versa.
> I learned English only relatively late in life, and while reading the
> Hebrew bible as a boy, and later as a young man, had nothing to fall back
> upon but Hebrew itself. I knew no other language but Hebrew and could hope
> to understand the biblical text only from within the language itself (we did
> not have at home, nor at school, even a Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary). My
> parents, like their parents and parents of parents, were not native Hebrew
> speakers and studied the bible by translation from their native tongues.
>

Thanks for your history. However, you fail to acknowledge is that modern
Hebrew (which is what I presume that you learned first) is not the same
language as Biblical Hebrew. If Elijah were to return tomorrow and visit Tel
Aviv, it is unlikely that he’ll understand more than scattered words, not
complete sentences.


> So what do I do now? I open the Hebrew dictionary of Eben Shoshan ("open"
> is only for the sake of this argument, otherwise I don't need him) and see
> that IWAH is (the often metaphorical) IQEM עקם. So far so good, but what is
> this IQEM? I don't look further because I know that this lexical chasing of
> meaning will cause me to go in circles and will be without end. By now I
> know that IQEM is, more or less, what the English call 'bend, crook'.
> Internally, from within the language, I understand that IQEM is 'caused to
> QUM, caused to rise in a heaped shape'. But all this is but the IBAH עבה
> which I said (to myself mostly) in the first place.
>

I have no idea what עקם means, as it is not a Biblical Hebrew word. But the
causative of ‘to stand (up)’ is הקים, a completely different word.


> Conclusion: there is no intrinsic understanding of the Hebrew language
> without these equivalents.
>

These equivalents do not follow what we know of how people use languages,
including the use of loan words (which can completely mess up your posited
equivalents). We have a better understanding of the language by looking at
how the people actually used the language, than by making up theories in
ivory towers.

>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
> Karl W. Randolph.