To: "Raymond de Hoop" <rdehoop AT keyaccess.nl>, "Biblical Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: RE: Goliath
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 14:57:57 -0000
See below.
Peter Kirk
-----Original Message-----
From: Raymond de Hoop [mailto:rdehoop AT keyaccess.nl]
Sent: 09 February 2001 12:02
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: Goliath
Peter,
A few remarks in answer to your posting.
> Firstly, you assume a single copyist. Rather more likely is two
generations
> of copyists who damaged the 2 Samuel text: the first who copied hurriedly,
> added a second )RGYM (that word starts with aleph, not ayin), and perhaps
> wrote BYT and )T unclearly; and a second who tried to make sense of the
text
> he saw, which may have been damaged as well as written unclearly.
Isn't this hypothesis upon hypothesis?
PK: No, it is one hypopthesis, that one scribe totally messed up copying
this part of the text. It is not a separate hypothesis that a later copyist
tidied it up because the text we now have is tidy. Not two lightning
strikes, as Ian suggests, but one strike and the necessary repair work.
<snip>
Nevertheless, I just wondered what's wrong with assuming that one scribe or
the other (and very likely the Chronicler) _deliberately_ changed the text
by changing some letters from the text he used as a source inorder to get a
correct version?
PK: We still have to explain the existence of the 2 Samuel text of this
verse as we have it now. This is clearly corrupt. Do you have any other
hypothesis for how this occurred except for copyists' errors? I accept that
the Chronicles text may be a separate tidying up of a corrupt text rather
than a witness to the pre-corruption original. But I very much doubt that
the 2 Samuel text can be what the author originally intended.