Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jerry Shepherd <jshepherd53 AT gmail.com>]

Hi Karl,

 

You said: "You sound like a perfect medievalist, i.e. one who follows medieval way of thinking. They studied commentaries before making their own opinions.  The Reformation turned that on its head, go to the origin first, in the case of theology to the Bible, only after then look at commentaries and evaluate them based on how well they followed Scripture."

 

Your characterization of what you refer to as medievalist and then the Reformation is both naïve and misleading.  There were a number of medievalists who were painstaking scholars and certainly consulted and worked with the primary texts.  The Reformers did not necessarily look at the Bible first and then go to the commentaries.  And when they consulted the commentaries, they did not simply do so in order to evaluate the commentaries, but they also learned from the commentaries and used the information in them to shape and sometimes correct their own exegesis of Scripture.

 

You said: "I’ve forgotten the name of this logical fallacy, but if you look at my message from July 19, you’ll see that my statement refers not to what followed my statement, but to “The grand majority of translations and commentators” that preceded my statement, to which your quote also disagreed. You conflated my statement to a context other than to where I applied it."

 

Sorry, Karl; but the confusion is yours here.  First of all, this is a terribly convoluted paragraph.  Second, I did not make a conflation.  I was only reacting to the statements in your post of July 18: "Why do you think I normally don’t read commentaries? . . . If you reported accurately concerning these commentaries (not saying that you didn’t, just using this as a rhetorical intro), here we find commentators have not done their homework vis-à-vis the Hebrew language is concerned."

 

You said: "That's still a noun."

 

Yes, Karl, but a verbal noun.  The meaning of the verb does not change because it is expressed in participial form.

 

You said: "A participle can also refer to the acting out of an action when used as a noun. E.g. 'The searching for words in a dictionary can be frustrating' and as far as I can tell, Biblical Hebrew uses participles in a similar manner. "

 

No, biblical Hebrew does not use the participle as a gerund.  The participle is sometimes used predicatively as a main verb; in other instances it is used as an adjective/noun, either attributively or substantivally to name or describe the subject of the participle.  That is why  the gender and number of the participle has to agree with the subject of the participle being described.  But the participle is not used gerundively in the Hebrew Bible.  The infinitive construct is used for that purpose. (Perhaps others could correct me on this, but I don't know of any instances).

 

You said: "Are you claiming that I’m misusing another linguistic term? I have repeatedly defined my understanding of 'wide semantic range' as meaning that can be applied in many different contexts."

 

Yes, you are misuing another linguistic term.  Semantic range refers to the variety of meanings that a particular lexeme might have in different contexts.  Linguists do not view the lexeme as having one "meaning that can be applied in many different contexts."

 

Perhaps you'll remember this post from Barry:

 

"My favorite teaching example for demonstrating semantic range:  'The captain can run the ship with a run in her stocking while her crew members run a race on the run on deck 10.'  Now, what does 'run' mean?"

 

Barry's point was that each of these occurrences is a different meaning of the lexeme "run."

 

Finally, you give what you consider to be three examples of נכח used as a verb in the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 14:2, Isaiah 57:2, Ezekiel 46:9.

 

In none of these passages is נכח used as a verb.  In Exod 14:2 and Ezek 46:9, it is a preposition with a 3ms suffix.  In Isaiah 57:2 it is an adjective with a 3ms suffix.  The word is not used as a verb in the Hebrew Bible.

 

Blessings,

 

Jerry

Jerry Shepherd

Taylor Seminary

Edmonton, Alberta

jshepherd53 AT gmail.com