Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Rolf:

I haven’t weighed in on this discussion for exactly the following reason:

 

>
> 4)    Arguing from silence; which is a poor argument to begin with.

RF: ….  Your words about arguing from silence are strange, because everyone must argue from silence. We do not know how the name of God was written in the NT autographs, so also those who believe that the original NT contained KURIOS,  argue from silence.

Unfortunately, we must deal with what we have, and not speculate. Any argument from silence ends up as speculation.

We have a few mms fragments of the LXX from the Mideast, but what about the mms that were in use in Jewish communities in Turkey, Greece, Rome, etc. from that same time period? What did they have? None of those have survived. We know that early Christian practice followed Jewish practice in many respects, deliberately so, because the early church saw itself as a continuation of Judaism, but do we really know what was the practice in the Diaspora? Nothing survives. Any argument, therefore, is an argument from silence.

In other discussions on this list, I’m very loathe to change the text to make it easier to read. The only exceptions are where there is actual evidence from the DSS or similar sources that show that the text has been corrupted. I have no problem with discounting the Masoretic points, because they’re later than even the evidence we’re discussing here, but the consonantal text is not to be changed except on surviving evidence.

The reason I discount “evidence” from proto-Semitic is because that, too, is argument from silence, as its existence is based on speculation. Educated guesses, but still speculation.

I think discussions on this list would be better by avoiding speculation.

Karl W. Randolph.