Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jerry:

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Karl,

 

…

 

With regard to no. (6), you said, "In other words, you are arguing for the idea that I originally guessed at, namely that a “strike” does not mean to miss, rather it means an attempt to hit within a scoring area, or that the ball was delivered in such an area that such an attempt should have been made but wasn’t. You rejected this before, if I remember correctly, so now you push it?"

 

No, what I am arguing is that the word "strike" meaning miss was a development from the idea of "striking"at the ball and attempting to hit it.

This is what I originally speculated, and at the time my understanding was that you rejected this idea.

 

  By a series of developments, the word came to mean "miss" rather than hit.  The word came to mean something different from what it originally meant.

Sorry, this is not accurate, as hitting the ball but it being foul also counts, as well as not trying to hit it when it’s thrown fair. Because the count of “strike” is used for all three, it doesn’t mean “miss”.

 

Your headline example, "“Awful derailment in Canada is another strike against tank car design," is not an example of a root from a Germanic language; rather it is simply a metaphorical borrowing of "strike" in baseball.

As I asked Ruth, then how do you account for the exact same use in other Germanic languages where they don’t have baseball for a metaphoric source? 

 

You said, "The only reason this argument is being made in b-hebrew is so that you can argue that Hebrew words have widely varient meanings, even opposite meanings, without being homonyms or homographs. I read this as you wanting to play Humpty Dumpty with the text of Tanakh."

 

Karl, this is just plain silliness.

????

 

  I treat the text of the Hebrew Bible very seriously and with great reverence.  For me, the biblical text is the Word of God given by his Holy Spirit, and it is infallible.

Irrelevant to the question.

 

 Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I think it is illegitimate to straitjacket the meaning of the biblical text into a preconceived "single unique meaning" lexeme theory that at the same both ignores sound linguistic theory and subjects the biblical text to one's own whims.

This sounds like a complete misreading and misstating of what I do and say. Whatever you mean by “single unique meaning”, it doesn’t sound at all what I say. In other words, you play Humpty Dumpty with my words, and make them say something other than what I intended. Evidence: you latch onto that phrase in isolation without considering the whole of what I have said on the subject.

 

  Word meanings do develop over time, and they can in fact develop into opposite meanings or nuances.  Hebrew is not an exception, and the text of the Hebrew Bible, written over the course of a millenniun, is not an exception.  Failure to recognize this phenomenon is a failure to read the Hebrew Bible on its own terms.

Languages in isolation tend to change at slower rates than where they are active and in contact with other languages. An example was Appalachia in the 1930s was a place where ethnologists and linguists went to study 18th century English customs and language, as Appalachia had been so cut off that it had changed little from that time.

From the time of Moses to Nebuchadnezzar, Hebrew was a relatively isolated language where native speakers only rarely heard dialectal differences within their language, let alone other languages. This is also the only time where we can confidently say that we deal with native speakers of Hebrew. After Nebuchadnezzar we have evidence that the people were native speakers of Aramaic, and all the changes that would cause in their use of Hebrew. Before Moses, the only evidence we have is Genesis, and we don’t know how much editing and updating that Moses did to the older language, if any.

For that 800 year period, how many changes can you document? I’d like to see some.

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com

 

Karl W. Randolph.