Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jerry:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com> wrote:

Karl,

 

First, you evidently don't know what "begging the question" means.

"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

You assume your answers are correct without addressing the questions raised.

 

Second, you are trying to argue two different positions.  First, you want to say that in the pre-exilic biblical books, matres lectiones were seldom used.  But then you want to give evidence of a number of epigraphic texts that have the matres.

I had been reading them as consonants, so it slipped my mind that you read them as vowels.

 

  To be sure, matres lectiones were employed in the centuries prior to the sixth century, but the evidence is that first they were at the end of the words, then gradually came to be used internally,

Not evidenced by the examples I gave.

 

and that things really took off around the sixth century.  But, you can hardly say that matres lectiones only appear seldom in the pre-exilic biblical texts, when in fact they occur all over the place in great abundance.  The fact that they occur in such great quantity is evidence of having undergone a substantial editing process in the exilic and post-exilic periods.

You have no evidence for this claim. Not in Hebrew at least.

By claiming this, you show you have less trust for the consonantal text to be original than I have for the Masoretic points to be accurate, which I say I don’t trust. 

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com

 

Karl W. Randolph.