Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

Karl,

They are figures of speech to us today who live on this side of the 
Copernican revolution. This does not mean they were figures of speech in 
antiquity. They could be, but we'd need to see the evidence. Even the 
Ptolemaic universe, as I understand it, was geocentric rather than 
heliocentric. Therefore, when the ancients said, "The sun rises," they 
actually thought that the sun rose. If they didn't think that, where are the 
descriptions for what they did think was happening? Why did they use this 
particular 'figure of speech', and not give us any other ways of really 
describing what was happening as they understood it, in fact they understood 
'sunrise' and 'sunset' as purely figurative?

In terms of biblical 'apostasy', I don't see what that has to do with the 
architecture of the universe in the ancient mindset. Apostasy seems to be a 
covenantal concept, describing disobedience and/or disloyalty to the covenant 
deity. Please show me where a biblical writer discusses having the wrong 
cosmology as 'apostasy'. Also, would we have the same standard of 'orthodoxy' 
about their biology? If so, we'd have to consider Jeremiah, who thinks with 
his kidneys, as an apostate.

Job 26.10 is the verbal form of the root.

As for your other arguments, you're dealing with a series of 'could' 
statements, for each of which there is another 'could not'. These kinds of 
arguments are merely discussing possibilities and ignoring the hard contexts 
in which the relevant words occur. In other words, it is an acontextual 
approach to semantics that entertains possibilities by overlooking hard data 
that suggests plausibilities.

You can entertain the possibilities all you like. I could propose that חוג 
actually means dodecahedral prism because it might be related to the root for 
making pilgrimage, and all of Israel, the twelve tribes, were told to make 
pilgrimage, and therefore the number most naturally associated with that root 
is twelve. But how are you going to assess the viability of this argument? 
It's possible!

But at the very least, to use your own argument, חוג might mean sphere, but 
it also might not. It might also mean just circle or ring. And indeed, that's 
how the ancient Greek translators did understand it. Keep putting forth 
possibilities, but I've yet to see an argument of plausibility.



GEORGE ATHAS
Dean of Research,
Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)
Sydney, Australia