Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

george,

i wonder if ANY text analysis can be completely free from some external
pressupositions. for example in gen 13:1

  וַיַּעַל אַבְרָם מִמִּצְרַיִם

one has to abandon the literal meaning, "went up/rose", and accept the
borrowed meaning, "migrated back". the text does NOT imply that the 
ancients perceived egypt as physically lower than canaan. and in gen 23:8

שְׁמָעוּנִי, וּפִגְעוּ-לִי בְּעֶפְרוֹן בֶּן-צֹחַר 

"hit/harm" is rejected and "entreat" is adopted for obvious reasons. 
when we form a phrase, our words try to approximate a certain image; more
often than not, if our phrasing is not perfect, we rely on the listener's
capacity to reconstruct the same image in spite of its imperfection. but the
listener must cooperate by flexibilizing his definitions of the words. i think
that "(L PNY HRQY(" in gen 1-2 implies a necessarily touchable 
literal surface only under a very inflexible reading.

nir cohen

>>> De: George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>
Para: "b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Data: Sun, 9 Sep 2012 08:31:40 +0000
Assunto: Re: [b-hebrew] skies in plural?
None of this gets around the basic exegetical fact: In Gen 1, the birds fly
across the surface of the רקיע, just like the spirit/wind hovers across the
surface of the waters. If it has a surface, it is perceived as something that
could be touched. That's what the text says.

>>> Whether the ancients understood this as a metaphor is another issue, but
one which inevitably sees us importing extra-textual considerations, into the
equation. In other words, the argument that the רקיע is not actually something
that could be touched is invariably a foray into tangential considerations
that take us away from what the writer of Gen 1 actually wrote.