Exodus 10:3 until when

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Jason Hare
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Jason Hare »

Jonathan Beck wrote: Sat Jun 26, 2021 3:18 pm A veyiqtol is an irreal imperfect which should come into English as future tense.
To be clear, the difference in verse 28 between veyiqtol and vayyiqtol would be וְיֵעָשֶׂה vəyēʿāśeh (veyiqtol) and וַיֵּעָשֶׂה vayyēʿāśeh (vayyiqtol), respectively. This is the difference between וְיִקְטֹל vəyiqṭōl and וַיִּקְטֹל vayyiqṭōl, a distinction that is taught in all Hebrew grammars and maintained by the Masoretic tradition. It applies to וְיִשְׁמֹר vəyišmōr and וַיִּשְׁמֹר vayyišmōr and all other verbs.

The veyiqtol applies to the future, or the future of the temporal reference, and the vayyiqtol is the normal form of the narrative past.
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kwrandolph
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by kwrandolph »

Jonathan Beck wrote: Sat Jun 26, 2021 3:18 pm I have said over and over again that wayyiqtol is a distinctly past-tense form based on the yaqtulu pattern in protosemitic. The yiqtol and vayyiqtol each evolved form an original *yaqtul and *yaqtulu form, respectively.

Jonathan
Protosemitic is not evidence, as it is a language for which we have no evidence of it ever existing. It is purely a theoretical construct based on certain presuppositions that may or may not be correct.

As for the semitic languages, they were distinct from their earliest extent examples. Were those distinctions already present at the Tower of Babel when God mixed up the languages?

As for historical Biblical Hebrew, all we have is Tanakh. That was written from about 1450–400 BC. Internal evidence of Genesis is that Moses compiled it from older documents, but did he update the language when he wrote it? The last native speakers who wrote were Ezekiel and Daniel. The post-Babylonian exile Hebrew was a learned second language, similar to post-Roman Latin. That roughly 900 year history of native speakers writing Biblical Hebrew shows very little change in the language.

The vowel points were added a millennium after Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a natively spoken language. There’s no question that they don’t represent Biblical era pronunciations. How much do they represent Biblical Hebrew grammar and usages? There are clear cases where one can give evidence that the points are wrong as far as meaning.

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Jonathan Beck
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Jonathan Beck »

Hi Karl, just a few things here.
kwrandolph wrote: Protosemitic is not evidence, as it is a language for which we have no evidence of it ever existing. It is purely a theoretical construct based on certain presuppositions that may or may not be correct.
You are right in that protosemitic doesn't constitute solid evidence. However, we have constructed that protosemitic based on what we know, for instance, about Arabic (which has largely remained unchanged between classical and modern), Akkadian, and Ugaritic, the former of which we have LOTS of texts from. So linguists and grammarians assume that proto-Hebrew once shared a lot of the characteristics of Arabic and Akkadian; for instance, that Hebrew originally contained case endings which eventually dropped out of use. We still have evidence of these case endings, though; for instance, in the locative he and the he on the cohortative.
kwrandolf wrote: As for the semitic languages, they were distinct from their earliest extent examples. Were those distinctions already present at the Tower of Babel when God mixed up the languages?
We can't possibly know that. Personally, I think the story is metaphorical. We know from linguistic science that languages don't just spread like that. Further, the languages may be distinct enough, but languages that come from the same region share a lot of the same characteristics, some of which are virtually identical. For instance, there is very little difference between Moabite inscriptions and what you'd find in Biblical Hebrew.
kwrandolph wrote:As for historical Biblical Hebrew, all we have is Tanakh. That was written from about 1450–400 BC. Internal evidence of Genesis is that Moses compiled it from older documents
Actually, internal evidence suggests that Moses did not write the Pentateuch at all, or at least very little of it. There were at least four distinct sources. Furthernmore, how did Moses continue writing the Pentateuch after his death in Deuteronomy? Now, if we find a copy of the Torah written in ancient Egyptian, which is the language in which Moses likely wrote (if in fact he was a real person, which I doubt) I will certainly rethink my position, both as to the existence of Moses as well as the composition of the Pentateuch. Super-conservative evangelicals are the only ones who believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch; even church fathers such as Augustine didn't think he wrote it.
kwrandolph wrote:The vowel points were added a millennium after Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a natively spoken language. There’s no question that they don’t represent Biblical era pronunciations. How much do they represent Biblical Hebrew grammar and usages? There are clear cases where one can give evidence that the points are wrong as far as meaning.
Of course you are correct. What makes a difference here is how faithful you believe that the Masoretes were to the pronunciation of the text. They put in vowel points in order to preserve the oral tradition because people were forgetting how to pronounce it. Yes, there are mistakes in the pointing, but that doesn't mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Further, the imperfections inherent in the pointed text don't give you license to come up with your own system and just say "they're wrong." In order to do that, you would have to assume that they were ALL wrong, which is quite a leap. If you have faith enough to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch and the Bible is divinely inspired (by the way, I DO believe the Bible to be divinely inspired), then why do you assume that the preservation of the oral tradition is wrong? Personally, I believe God was a part of this process as well.

Respectfully,

Jonathan
Jonathan Beck
Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati
Interim Pastor, Norwood Grace UMC, Cincinnati, OH.
kwrandolph
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by kwrandolph »

Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Hi Karl, just a few things here.
kwrandolph wrote: Protosemitic is not evidence, as it is a language for which we have no evidence of it ever existing. It is purely a theoretical construct based on certain presuppositions that may or may not be correct.
You are right in that protosemitic doesn't constitute solid evidence. However, we have constructed that protosemitic based on what we know, …
That’s just the problem—there are just too many things that we don’t know, and cannot know.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm for instance, about Arabic (which has largely remained unchanged between classical and modern), Akkadian, and Ugaritic, the former of which we have LOTS of texts from. So linguists and grammarians assume that proto-Hebrew once shared a lot of the characteristics of Arabic and Akkadian; for instance, that Hebrew originally contained case endings which eventually dropped out of use. We still have evidence of these case endings, though; for instance, in the locative he and the he on the cohortative.
Notice your use of the word “assume”. That’s exactly my point. You make assumptions where there’s no evidence whether those assumptions are accurate or mistaken.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm
kwrandolf wrote: As for the semitic languages, they were distinct from their earliest extent examples. Were those distinctions already present at the Tower of Babel when God mixed up the languages?
We can't possibly know that.
This is a matter of which version of history do you trust?
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Personally, I think the story is metaphorical. We know from linguistic science that languages don't just spread like that.
Not normally today. The picture given in Tanakh is that this spreading of the languages was not normal, rather had a supernatural origin. Do you accept that there’s a God who in six days created the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that’s in them? If yes, what’s to stop him from a little thing like mixing up languages in one night?
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Further, the languages may be distinct enough, but languages that come from the same region share a lot of the same characteristics, some of which are virtually identical. For instance, there is very little difference between Moabite inscriptions and what you'd find in Biblical Hebrew.
I’ve read the Mesha stele, and noted the linguistic similarities and differences. But Moabite was basically a Hebrew dialect, seeing that historically it branched off from Hebrew.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm
kwrandolph wrote:As for historical Biblical Hebrew, all we have is Tanakh. That was written from about 1450–400 BC. Internal evidence of Genesis is that Moses compiled it from older documents
Actually, internal evidence suggests that Moses did not write the Pentateuch at all, or at least very little of it. There were at least four distinct sources. Furthernmore, how did Moses continue writing the Pentateuch after his death in Deuteronomy?
Okay, so you believe the Documentary Hypothesis. I won’t argue with it, except to say that I read a history of that theory from its beginnings in the first decade of the 19th century, its evidence and philosophy, and I personally reject it. You can believe it if you wish, but don’t insist that I agree with you, as that is proselytism. But I also ask you not to be offended if I take the historical view.

We see in Joshuaa 24:26 that he added to Torah, which would account for the final chapter of Deuteronomy. But we don’t have to rely on that, in that God was able to tell Moses to write that final chapter before the events happened.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Now, if we find a copy of the Torah written in ancient Egyptian, which is the language in which Moses likely wrote (if in fact he was a real person, which I doubt) I will certainly rethink my position, both as to the existence of Moses as well as the composition of the Pentateuch.
Why would he write in Egyptian? He was a member of a people who had a different language from Egyptian. There are examples of peoples keeping their languages alive even when living among other nations, even for centuries. Then there are other examples where languages are lost within two generations. What evidence is there that Moses may have been a member of the latter group?
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Super-conservative evangelicals are the only ones who believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch; even church fathers such as Augustine didn't think he wrote it.
Augustine was a neo-Platonist, not an orthodox Christian. He took his cues more from Plato than the Bible. There were many like him who wanted more the praise of men, to be considered intellectual, than to follow exactly what the Bible teaches.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm
kwrandolph wrote:The vowel points were added a millennium after Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a natively spoken language. There’s no question that they don’t represent Biblical era pronunciations. How much do they represent Biblical Hebrew grammar and usages? There are clear cases where one can give evidence that the points are wrong as far as meaning.
Of course you are correct. What makes a difference here is how faithful you believe that the Masoretes were to the pronunciation of the text. They put in vowel points in order to preserve the oral tradition because people were forgetting how to pronounce it.
I think the Masoretes were very faithful, to the Tiberian tradition of pronunciation. But it is the Tiberian tradition that they inherited that differs greatly from Biblical era pronunciations.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm Yes, there are mistakes in the pointing, but that doesn't mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Further, the imperfections inherent in the pointed text don't give you license to come up with your own system and just say "they're wrong." In order to do that, you would have to assume that they were ALL wrong, which is quite a leap.
Nah, I just ignore them. Where they’re correct as far as meanings go, they’re just clutter on the page. Where they’re wrong, they’re a distraction. It’s easier just to ignore them and concentrate on the consonantal text. Better yet, just read a text that doesn’t have them, the same way Hebrew was read before the points were invented.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:56 pm If you have faith enough to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch and the Bible is divinely inspired (by the way, I DO believe the Bible to be divinely inspired), then why do you assume that the preservation of the oral tradition is wrong? Personally, I believe God was a part of this process as well.

Respectfully,

Jonathan
Yes, God could have preserved Biblical Hebrew pronunciations, or he could have just allowed the pronunciations to become lost as people applied the pronunciations of their native tongues—Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Latin—to the Hebrew text. The evidence I’ve seen seems to point to the latter.

Karl W. Randolph.
Isaac Fried
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Isaac Fried »

Karl writes
I think the Masoretes were very faithful, to the Tiberian tradition of pronunciation. But it is the Tiberian tradition that they inherited that differs greatly from Biblical era pronunciations.
How do we know all this? Are there examples for words pronounced differently in "Tiberian tradition of pronunciation" and Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com
kwrandolph
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by kwrandolph »

Isaac Fried wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:10 pm Karl writes
I think the Masoretes were very faithful, to the Tiberian tradition of pronunciation. But it is the Tiberian tradition that they inherited that differs greatly from Biblical era pronunciations.
How do we know all this? Are there examples for words pronounced differently in "Tiberian tradition of pronunciation" and Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?

Isaac Fried, Boston University
www.hebrewetymology.com
There are very few transliterations from the Biblical era, but a few that I can name right off include יפת who was called “Yapeta” by early Greeks, “Yupeter” by the Romans, לבי called “labaya” and as late as the first century in backwards Galilee ירושלם was pronounced “Yerosoluma”, a transliteration that may have missed the “w” because that sound was not in the Greek language. There are other clues that the בגדכפת letters each had only one sound in Biblical Hebrew, not the two sounds found in Tiberian Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew has a meter in poetry, when read as a syllabary, with each consonant followed by a vowel, a meter that is lost in the Tiberian tradition. But these clues are not enough to reconstruct a Biblical era pronunciation.

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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Jonathan Beck »

Isaac Fried wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:10 pm Karl writes
I think the Masoretes were very faithful, to the Tiberian tradition of pronunciation. But it is the Tiberian tradition that they inherited that differs greatly from Biblical era pronunciations.
How do we know all this? Are there examples for words pronounced differently in "Tiberian tradition of pronunciation" and Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?
Just because I have faith that the Masoretes were meticulous in the preservation of their tradition. How do we know that they were meticulous? Simply because we see very little difference between the Masoretic text and the Dead Sea scrolls, which were written nearly a thousand years apart from each other. So yes, it's safe to say that they were meticulous with the preservation of their tradition.

Jonathan
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Kenneth Greifer
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Kenneth Greifer »

Jonathan Beck wrote: Tue Jun 29, 2021 6:33 pm
Isaac Fried wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:10 pm Karl writes
I think the Masoretes were very faithful, to the Tiberian tradition of pronunciation. But it is the Tiberian tradition that they inherited that differs greatly from Biblical era pronunciations.
How do we know all this? Are there examples for words pronounced differently in "Tiberian tradition of pronunciation" and Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?
Just because I have faith that the Masoretes were meticulous in the preservation of their tradition. How do we know that they were meticulous? Simply because we see very little difference between the Masoretic text and the Dead Sea scrolls, which were written nearly a thousand years apart from each other. So yes, it's safe to say that they were meticulous with the preservation of their tradition.

Jonathan
I read that there are over 2,600 differences between the Masoretic text of Isaiah and the Isaiah scroll they have from the Dead Sea scrolls.
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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Chris Watts »

Kenneth Greifer wrote: Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:03 am I read that there are over 2,600 differences between the Masoretic text of Isaiah and the Isaiah scroll they have from the Dead Sea scrolls.
Are you referring to minor textual differences of missing letters or whole sentences or even different renderings?

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Re: Exodus 10:3 until when

Post by Jason Hare »

Kenneth Greifer wrote: Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:03 am
Jonathan Beck wrote: Tue Jun 29, 2021 6:33 pm
Isaac Fried wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:10 pm Karl writes

How do we know all this? Are there examples for words pronounced differently in "Tiberian tradition of pronunciation" and Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?
Just because I have faith that the Masoretes were meticulous in the preservation of their tradition. How do we know that they were meticulous? Simply because we see very little difference between the Masoretic text and the Dead Sea scrolls, which were written nearly a thousand years apart from each other. So yes, it's safe to say that they were meticulous with the preservation of their tradition.

Jonathan
I read that there are over 2,600 differences between the Masoretic text of Isaiah and the Isaiah scroll they have from the Dead Sea scrolls.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is consistently called upon as being extremely close to the MT. Twenty-six hundred sounds like a lot of differences that I don't think are really there. ;)
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