Masoretes and their lack of knowledge?

[Kenneth Greifer]

Chris,

I was just telling you what other people say about the word. I don't think they are right about the alef.

I think that the fragment has another yud that looks big like a vav also.

I wrote an alternative explanation of "like a lion" in Psalm 22. I don't know if you looked at it. It is in a separate topic.

Kenneth Greifer

[Isaac Fried]

Galena says
c) translate this verse: ...as a lion at my feet and my hands.... "at" assumed of course.
Says I
Yes, the verse makes perfect sense as is
כִּי סְבָבוּנִי כְּלָבִים, עֲדַת מְרֵעִים, הִקִּיפוּנִי כָּאֲרִי, יָדַי וְרַגְלָי
with כָּאֲרִי as an encircling lion.
No "deformed" hands and feet, just blood thirsty lions and mad dogs prowling and growling around threatening hand and foot.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Galena]

Hallo Isaac, first I can not go along with an encircling lion since that would be one pretty elongated new species of lion However, I never thought to take away the 'atnah' that is under the 'peh' of this verb הִקִּיפוּנִי and tried joining it to the next line. I had trouble doing this at first, but I stared for quite some time at its meaning in the qal and hiphil and compared its usage to its synonym סבב, I noticed a difference, surround and encircle would in English signify being trapped. But הִקִּיפוּנִי is used to mean completed and joined in a circle as in Job 1:5 Lev 19:17 and others. I detect a subtle difference in the two synonyms, surround, encircle does not necessarily imply being joined, completed, touching each end to end, and therefore does not have that final power of entrapment that the word הִקִּיפוּנִי has. It is therefore a possibility that I could read the following:

...they surrounded me as dogs - a company a gathering of evil;
they trapped me like a lion - my hands and my feet...

The poetic idea/feeling that I pick up is: they surrounded me as dogs, see! - this company of evil; they trapped me as a lion, see! my hands and my feet.
While מְרֵעִים is often translated as evil men - obviously, that 'men' understandably are implied, but in this context there is no reason why the word "men" needs to be inserted, since a company of evil is poetically in this instance actually more powerful, the plurality of this evil is intense.

I have no choice right now but to refer to the fact that there are I think 7 references to the crucifixion quoted from Psalm 22 and not one quoted this verse, being the most obvious I think. This can be poo-pooed away as insignificant with obvious excuses. The reason why they did not comment this verse was precisely because it did not mean dug, mauled, deformed or pierced.

Kenneth said:

I wrote an alternative explanation of "like a lion" in Psalm 22. I don't know if you looked at it. It is in a separate topic.

Yes I know Kenneth but I can not really go along with this if you don't mind.

Karl re what you wrote below: this site: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.a ... qumran.htm
Here is the image :


kind regards

[kwrandolph]

I just examined "Nahal Hever" scroll relevant to this thread from the best image from the web that I could find.

Do you mean this image? http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/explor ... e/B-366234 This one is really poor. There are ways to improve it, starting with lighting, then polarizing filters on both the lights and camera, and if all else fails, there are some high tech means to distinguish the letters from the leather. It looks as if none of these techniques were used.

I wonder if this is a deliberately poor image?

Years ago I saw a much improved image, and we discussed it on this forum then, but it was embedded in another document and now I don’t remember where it was found.

As for the septuagint is it or is it not true that It is universally accepted that the rabbis who created the original Septuagint only translated the Five Books of Moses, and nothing more. Is this confirmed by Aristeas, the Talmud, Josephus, the Church fathers, (though I am aware that the Aristeas letter has been reported to be a forgery? - I do not know).

All the historical records for the LXX that I’ve seen indicate that the translators started with Torah, the first five books of Moses, but by a century thereabouts later, all of Tanakh had been translated. The time period was roughly from 250 – 150 BC.

The only alternative that I am considering is Karl's at this moment, if he explains his hypothesis from the grammar perspective.

This is not my hypothesis. I just went and looked at what others had already seen, and saw the same as they did.

I am left with three options::

a) maligned, deformed, a verb where the root is attested to a cognate language, but this would beg the most important issue as to why David chose it.

Why not? If it best describes what David intended?

Remember, Tanakh contains only a portion of the Biblical Hebrew language that was spoken at that time. I don’t know how many words are used only once in Tanakh, it looks as if the number is well over 1000, then many other words used only two or three times. Yet something as short as the Gezar calendar contains vocabulary not found in Tanakh. So here we have a word used once as a verb, forcing us to go to cognate languages to see if they have a clue to its meaning.

b) leave it unchanged, and accept that this is a rhetorical device used by David to alert us to his sense of suddenness of panic or fear, or abruptness designed to help us feel the sense of confusion he must have felt by leaving us with such an ambiguously seemingly non-sensical sentence, or as I prefer to consider it - a sentence without a verb - IE a moment where there is no movement forward, and David intended his readers to experience this by using a literary device of absence (used in other scriptures of which I have two examples).

There are plenty of Hebrew sentences without a verb, but they aren’t nonsense sentences that don’t fit the context as “like a lion are my hands and feet”

c) translate this verse: ...as a lion at my feet and my hands.... "at" assumed of course.

This is adding to the text.

Kind regards
chris

Karl W. Randolph.

[Galena]

We've crossed posts Karl, so please see post above for additions rather than me writing new post here.
Kind regards
Chris

[Isaac Fried]

I see no substantial difference between סבב and הקיף. I find 'trap' too harsh. There is no indication from the verse that King David came to any harm, he was only well surrounded, hands and feet, by "dogs" and "lions", wishing him ill.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Galena]

I see no substantial difference between סבב and הקיף. I find 'trap' too harsh. .

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Sorry Isaac but I am surprised, unless you want me to spell it all out I can assure you that there is a difference, according to Davidson's dictionary, between these two words even though they can both be used to mean surround, although the second word can never mean surround in the Qal.

Isaac: There is no indication from the verse that King David came to any harm, he was only well surrounded, hands and feet, by "dogs" and "lions", wishing him ill

To be trapped does not necessariy put you in harms way, I have on occasions felt trapped myself, mentally emotionally by circumstances and I am sure that if I had written a poem at that time I would have used words like surrounded by trapped by enclosed hemmed in, threatened - all by circumstances outside of one's control. And given that David was speaking about Bulls, and dogs, and lions roaring, I hardly think my choice of this word is out of character for the emotions involved in this psalm. And if he can count all his bones then I presume he is well overdue for a cooked dinner, going hungry would also exacerbate the feelings of agony under these circumstances. Unless of course I have missed a metaphor in this particular instance.

Kind regards
Chris

[kwrandolph]

Chris:

Not a bad image for this document. In fact, it’s fairly good. Yet only one line and a couple of words on a second are clear enough that we can make observations on the letter shapes. Much of the rest we can make out the words, but the shapes of the letters are somewhat smudged. The scribe who wrote this consistently wrote the yods not only shorter than the waws, but he also gave them a peaked top, while the waws are not only longer, but have a sloped top.

With this being the case, I don’t see how you can doubt that in this document, כארו ends with a waw, making it a verb.

I don’t know who added those red and green letters, but I can see at least one mistake that he made.

Karl W. Randolph.

[Isaac Fried]

Joshua 6:11
וַיַּסֵּב אֲרוֹן-יְהוָה אֶת-הָעִיר, הַקֵּף פַּעַם אֶחָת
NIV: "So he had the ark of the Lord carried around the city, circling it once"
KJV: "So the ark of the Lord compassed the city, going about it once"

Ps. 48:13
סֹבּוּ צִיּוֹן וְהַקִּיפוּהָ

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Galena]

Karl

With this being the case, I don’t see how you can doubt that in this document, כארו ends with a waw, making it a verb.

yes I agree here when looking at this one, unfortunately I also saw this one at the same time https://onedaringjew.files.wordpress.co ... /kaaru.jpg but I posted the above instead. the trouble is with all these images they are on a computer where photoshop has been used to improve the image, enhance the letters and so on. The hook at the top of this vav has the same hook as the yod and if you look at the next previous vav you see a straight line. Comparing the vavs and yods in the first image it is easy to see how two of the yods look like vavs anyway. But listen, all this is conjecture, I am looking at an image on a computer. Would be great to see the real thing. After all they had for 40 years and no one noticed this before? Strange since psalm 22 is known as the big controversy! I would have thought this scrap of paper would have seen the light of day before 1997? The arab website appears to be questioning the authenticity of the vav, by its images it looks like a scribe might well have written a yod and then his colleague disagreed, they chatted over coffee and decided to lengthen the yud to a vav after the ink was dry?

Kind regards
chris


Hallo Isaac

Joshua 6:11
וַיַּסֵּב אֲרוֹן-יְהוָה אֶת-הָעִיר, הַקֵּף פַּעַם אֶחָת
NIV: "So he had the ark of the Lord carried around the city, circling it once"
KJV: "So the ark of the Lord compassed the city, going about it once"

Ps. 48:13
סֹבּוּ צִיּוֹן וְהַקִּיפוּהָ

Joshua 6:11 - infinitive hiphil - Interesting point here is that the emphasis is on the ARK of the covenant of the Lord that goes around the city, not the people themselves ; this in itself would have been enough said, but then continues for power and emphasis that the ark of the covenant of the Lord now encircles the city; Its like me saying "...I will go around the castle and surround it..." I have just done two things, not used two synonyms to do one thing. The ark of the Lord goes around the city only once would have sufficed here, so it's not always just about pointless use of synonyms that mean the same thing to make the sentence sound nice, sometimes I see an important piece of teaching.

The only question I have is that I wonder why an infinitive absolute is used instead of an imperfect. I have read about these but knowing the grammar does not help me to understand and appreciate why they are used, except in cases of 'certainly definitely surely and indeed'.

Ps 48:13 - You are told/ordered to Go around Zion, and then the result is that you will encircle her and be able to count her towers etc. First an imperative, then comes the imperfect. First the order to go around zion, then the timeless aspect of encircling her. Not walk around her and then walk about her, this is the weakness of the translation unfortunately, and the fact that the word וְהַקִּיפוּהָ has a meaning in the qal of joining end to end, making a circle, fasten together, strike, provides me with the subtle difference between this and the simpler meaning of the qal of the former verb.

So maybe instead of trapped we could use the word enclosed?

Kind regards
chris

As a side issue, does not prove anything for the above but it is interesting and comments would be welcome: Look at psalm 119:9
בַּמֶּ֣ה יְזַכֶּה־נַּ֭עַר אֶת־אָרְח֑וֹ לִ֝שְׁמֹ֗ר כִּדְבָרֶֽךָ
Now the common translation poses the first half of this verse as a question, notice the atnah. Then the second half of this verse poses the answer. but it does not make sense theologically really, the word לִ֝שְׁמֹ֗ר, this is an infinitive construct. I translate this sentence as: In what way can a young man purify his walk by guarding himself according to your word? I see the whole verse as a question and everything that follows now becomes the answer. In other words the question becomes: How do I purify my ways simply by observing your word? The rest of this stanza provides answers. What do you think?