Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jerry:

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

 

Let me say thank you for all your contributions on wayyiqtol, and also for the spirit in which they were made.  Three observations:

 

(1) Old Testament scholars have to make choices as to where they will expend their efforts.

So true.

 

  So, since my seminary days, reading McFall's Enigma of the Hebrew Verbal System, taking advanced Hebrew grammar with Waltke, and working through his and O'Connor's views in their IBHS, my research interests have resided more with hermeneutics and biblical theology than with grammar.

This looks like more a studies about the Hebrew text, rather than studies of the Hebrew text.

 

  So I was quite a bit behind the latest research.  So, again, thanks for all the contributions.

I came to b-hebrew even more behind than you, having been cut off from all scholarly research for decades after only one year of formal training. But I came having read Tanakh through several times, read for meaning, not as a scholarly endeavor. After coming here, it appears that such studies are exceedingly rare, even among top scholars.

 

…

 

(3) I always like it when views long considered buried seem to experience a resurrection, though perhaps in a different form.  Perhaps that explains why, of all the views expressed, the one I find the most intriguing is the one advanced by Joosten and shared by Ken Penner.  So I think I will try to obtain Joosten's monograph and work through it.

I wonder if your time would be better spent just reading through Tanakh, cover to cover, to try to get a sense of the flow of the language. It won’t come at once, that takes time. For example, it took me about five times reading the text through before I came to the conclusion that all I had been taught about verbal conjugations was wrong, all the different views.

An example of getting a feeling for the flow of the language: when I first read the Jehoash inscription forgery, my first reaction was that it just didn’t feel right, like hearing a person who speaks English very well yet with an accent, an accent that’s not recognizable yet clearly heard. It was hard to find specific words where the language is recognizably wrong, so hard to explain to others what is wrong.

Often scholars want to push a particular understanding where they understand strict rules consistently followed—but language in use often isn’t that clear. Oh yes, some times there’s a clear choice which form is to be used, but there’s a fuzzy line between those different uses so that some times it is a judgment call which form to use.

Instead of reading what others say about the text, would it not be better just to sit down and read a chapter or two a day of the text? Wouldn’t that better fit your goals of hermeneutics and Biblical Theology?

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com

 Karl W. Randolph.