Comparison of Tiberian and Qumran

[kwrandolph]

Jonathan:

… Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) (Chronicles and Qohelet)…

Already an argument against taking the time to read the whole article. Qohelet is not LBH.

This would be to dismiss the research before evaluating the data.

I don’t have a lot of free time to read long, involved papers. So I take shortcuts where possible. When I see something that’s already flakey in the title or short description, such as the mislabeling Qohelet as LBH, I put that article as lower priority, when I might have some free time to fill. If one part of the article is already flakey, what about the rest of the article?

When you write a good paper you should announce your thesis then set out to prove it through logical arguments, and back up your premises and conclusion with data. This is exactly what he does. He argument is good and based on sound premises. If one opposes his conclusion(s), one must prove that the premises are false. In this case, one would have to challenge the data. This is how you do science.
…

I’ve read elsewhere that apparently late in the second temple period, that there was an effort to standardize the copies of Tanakh that were in circulation to a higher standard than what typified many of the mms in circulation. That would have been according to official copies kept in the temple. Those official copies would have been both more accurate and reflecting an older Hebrew than first century Hebrew.

I think that is the point of his paper and research; that new research is showing the opposite.

I think you misunderstand.

From what I was told, during the second temple period, there were liberties taken with the texts of the Tanakh, adding materes lectionis mostly, to conform to second temple era Hebrew. Apparently, however, during the late second temple era, particularly first century AD, there was an effort to clean up the Biblical MSS, I’m not talking about the non-Biblical texts, and in the process they became closer to what became the MT consonantal text. This study compared the ages of the texts with how well they conformed to the MT consonantal text, and found that the later Biblical ones were more like the MT.

Kindly,
Jonathan Mohler

Chris:

Hallo again Karl

Galena wrote:
The masoretes have every reason to be respected and any mistake should not be automatically viewed as an error, Psalm 145 is a classic example where the intellectuals and the scholars in all their knowledge failed to see the most simplest thing.

Karl replied: I have no idea of what you are talking in this example.

Very briefly Psalm 145 and the missing verse that should begin with a nun.

I downloaded a book that includes the DSS readings of Biblical books. It has much of Psalm 145, including the verse that reads, נאמן אלהים בדבריו וחסיד בכול מעשיו ברוך יהוה וברוך שמו לעולם ועד . If that verse is missing in the MT, it certainly looks like a typo (copyist error).

… but that missing verse is intentional and if you are interested just email me, the explanations are simple.

Seeing as it’s in the DSS, and the pattern says that it should be there, it certainly doesn’t look intentional that it’s missing.

Right now to Provers 1:19
כֵּן אָרְחוֹת כָּל־בֹּצֵעַ בָּצַע אֶת־נֶפֶשׁ בְּעָלָיו יִקָּח׃ I know what this says in English, unfortunately and to be honest, despite my myriad of reference books I can not find out what a qal perfect verb following a participle means, (it's hard to look these things up in an index and infuriating when you are trying to learn specifics).

You know it’s not a Qal Perfect, because there’s no perfect in Biblical Hebrew.

Anyway, having studied every dot I see no problem at all. What is the problem. It all looks perfectly fine to me.I see how in the hebrew the last verb יִקָּחrefers back to the qal perfect בָּצַע indicating that those who do the evil are the ones whose souls are being taken away. The whole of verse 19 closes verses 10 - 18. I looked hard, I can not see anything wrong at all. I wait with expectant agony to what you are about to let loose upon my uneducated senses.....

I don’t count you as uneducated, rather I count you as taking an extreme stance in support of the Masoretes, a stance that is not supported by the evidence. You are not the only one who takes such a stance.

Kind regards
chris

Proverbs is a book written in poetry. Most verses are written as two sentences in parallel, though with some one needs to take two or more verses to complete the parallelism.

Proverbs 1:19 consists of two sentences in parallel.

The first: כן ארחות כל בצע with the כן including its often inferred “to be”. בצע is a noun pointed as a participle (most participles are really nouns in Biblical Hebrew usage) indicating that this is the actor, an actor who is in the process of getting a cut (of the loot). A “cut” can be either positive as legitimate earnings, or negative as from loot, the context tells us which.

The second: בצע את נפש בעליו יקח. The word בצע is not a verb, rather a noun. It’s the subject of the sentence, the verb is יקח with the object being את נפש בעליו complete with accusative marker. If בצע is not a noun and subject of the sentence, then we have an incomplete sentence that has no subject. Seeing as this would be an object and not an actor, this would be a shegolate noun.

Taking the verse as a whole, the author has not only taken two sentences, but mirrored them with the added benefit that the words in the middle come from the same root, to wit: “Such are the roads of those who take a cut (of the loot), a cut (of the loot) the life of its owner takes.”

Karl W. Randolph.