Jason Hare wrote:kwrandolph wrote: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.)
I said specifically what I meant: if I quote long passages in Hebrew, you will not see what I'm trying to stress from the passage.
Here’s where I misunderstood your English. I took that statement to mean that you didn’t think I knew Biblical Hebrew.
Let’s translate that into a more understandable way—because you learned and teach medieval Hebrew, while I work with Biblical Hebrew, that we two may come to very different understandings of the same passage. In other words, I may disagree with you.
Jason Hare wrote:It's obvious that reading large passages and getting the sense of them is more natural in your native tongue (as it is for me in mine). That doesn't mean that you cannot read and understand biblical Hebrew. I never made that claim. It was about you understanding what I was trying to demonstrate in the quotation.
Actually, no. Over the years I’ve become so familiar with Biblical Hebrew that usually I can read a passage without looking up a single word. I’ll do more checking in discussion just to make sure I have it exact, but I do the same thing in my native tongue too.
Jason Hare wrote:kwrandolph wrote: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.
That's fine. I'm not trying to force you to participate in something that would damage your knowledge and feelings with regard to biblical Hebrew. I don't think it's as bad as you would have me or us believe, but you're free to your opinion. Good luck in your future endeavors.
No, I don’t feel forced. I thought it would be fun. But it’s turned out different from what I expected, which is why I’m dropping out.
Jonathan Beck wrote:Well-known curse? Maybe you don't know how the modern Israeli language was formed in the first place.
Probably better than you. It was started around the turn of the 20th century in Poland, based on Rabbinic, i.e. medieval, Hebrew.
Jonathan Beck wrote:It's not a curse. It's the evolution of language.
Languages change so much, that after a time the older becomes effectively a close cognate language. Or if enough time passes, a different but cognate language.
For me, reading Shakespeare is akin to me reading the Aramaic portions of Daniel and Ezra from my understanding of Biblical Hebrew—I can understand much of it from Biblical Hebrew, but there are parts that throw me for a loop because the Aramaic meanings of the same words are different from Biblical Hebrew.
Modern Israeli Hebrew is worse, I hardly understand any of it. For me, it’s easier to read Yiddish.
Jonathan Beck wrote: Yesterday I finished reading Nehemiah, again, … His writing has the feel of a foreigner trying to speak a learned language, ….
The issue isn't that Nehemiah doesn't know the Hebrew language; the issue is later Hebrew.
Who said anything about Nehemiah not knowing Hebrew? He knew it better than the author of Esther. He just wrote his book in a Hebrew that gives indications that it was a learned, second language, not his native tongue. The same way that medieval Europeans wrote Latin.
Like medieval Latin, so Hebrew continued to develop, influenced by other languages—first Aramaic, the native tongue of Judea after the Exile, then by the Indo-European languages of Persian, then Greek, add Latin to the mix so that by the DSS era, the spoken Hebrew had a different grammar and many words had different meanings from Biblical Hebrew.
Jonathan Beck wrote:The most recent exercise that Jason wrote was written in good Biblical Hebrew.
It was weird. He was translating from English, or modern Israeli Hebrew. Basically he started with “In this time of the corona virus…” He used the word זמן. But is that how an ancient Hebrew would have said it? In Biblical times זמן referred to an appointed time, עת for time in general. Both are used in Ecclesiastes 3:1.
However, when the ancient Hebrews spoke of “In the time of …” or “In his time …” they used the word “days” as in “In his days …” or “In the days of …” so that Biblical Hebrew would have started with בימי המגפת קרנית האלה.
To show how reading his statement in Hebrew affected my thinking—I recognized immediately that זמן was not the right word, but when I thought of making a correction, the use of זמן influenced me to try to make a correction using the word “time” עת. But that just didn’t sound right. I stewed over it for a few days, until I remembered the Biblical use of the word “days” in this context. Then it fell into place. If it took me this long for just the opening, can you imagine how long it would take me to analyze the whole paragraph?
What Jason wrote was not good Biblical Hebrew.
Jonathan Beck wrote:Blessings,
Jonathan
Karl W. Randolph.