Jason Hare wrote:I think you've said about ten times on this thread alone that I don't know biblical Hebrew because modern Hebrew has crept in and influenced my ability to read the text.
Please don’t make a straw man argument, I never said that you “don't know biblical Hebrew”, rather I claim that you have the well-known curse of cross-language corruption that especially affects those trying to speak close cognate languages.
There was a report that I read many years ago that claimed that it’s impossible for a modern person, speaking natively modern English, to write Shakespearian English. Scholars may get close, but there’s always a tweak here, a twinge there, that gives it away that the document is modern made by someone archaizing English.
The same is true for someone whose main language is modern Israeli Hebrew—no matter how hard he tries, it’s impossible for him to write pure Biblical Hebrew. The modern thinks first in modern Israeli Hebrew, then needs to translate his thoughts into Biblical Hebrew. The modern phraseology sounds so natural that even when he uses the correct Biblical Hebrew words, he may not recognize that the ancient Biblical era Hebrew speaker would have used different words to express the same idea.
Jason Hare wrote:On the contrary, I looked back through the thread and cannot locate where I said that you don't understand the language of the Bible—and I cannot imagine saying that, since I am completely convinced that you've read the Bible a million times in Hebrew. Why would I claim that you can't understand biblical Hebrew?
Let me quote you,
Jason Hare wrote:Given how different our perspectives are with regard to Hebrew, I don't think you'd get what I was pointing out if I posted two paragraphs of Hebrew text at you.
If that doesn’t mean in its context that you claimed that I don’t know Biblical Hebrew, what does it mean? (The context was quoting Bible passages.)
If you meant modern Israeli Hebrew, well … duh … it’s a very different language and I readily admit that I don’t know it.
Jason Hare wrote:That completely escapes me.
It escapes me too.
Jason Hare wrote:Anyway, please... back to the topic of the thread. Are you interested in using this subforum to exchange in biblical Hebrew or to attempt to? You don't have to, of course. That's just the purpose of this subforum: Hebrew Composition.
Yesterday I finished reading Nehemiah, again, and the Hebrew he used has a different feel to it, different from, set’s see, Isaiah, Jeremiah and other pre-exile authors. His writing has the feel of a foreigner trying to speak a learned language, who does a good job of it, yet has an accent that he can’t get rid of it. I can’t put my finger on it, but the feel is there.
No, I decided that I’d better not participate in this exercise. I found that even just reading your attempts was corrupting my feel for Biblical Hebrew. It’s not your fault. It’s just the milieu in which you live and work would stump even the greatest expert who ever lived, and I am not that expert.