Proverbs 23:7

[kwrandolph]

In Joshua 2:21, I get the sense that this is an acknowledgement of expectations for her and her family to be saved, because they refer to the future from the point that the statement was made, and refers not to a person, but to a situation.

Yes, the hoo refers to a situation. "so it is" instead of "so he is".

Actually that situation is an action “So it will be done.”

While I don’t know of anything exactly like this verse in Proverbs, the verse makes sense in the way I read it. I don’t see how it makes sense when one splits the middle portion in two. Remember, כמו is followed by a noun, so it reads “As it were a gate in his life, so he is”? He’s a gate? But if we allow some poetic word order, we get “As it were a gate in his life, so he ‘Eat and drink’ may say to you without his heart being with you.” That makes sense.

I agree that your reading makes sense. But it makes for very bad Hebrew writing.

Who says, and why?

This is Biblical Hebrew, not modern, medieval, nor even DSS Hebrew.

So would you say that Proverbs 1:19 is bad Hebrew?
כן ארחות כל-בצע, בצע את-נפש בעליו יקח
So [are] the traveling paths of all who take a cut [of the loot], a cut the life of its master takes.
The second half has a subject, object, verb. If that’s to what you are objecting, then here’s another example.

My reading, I think, means just about the same as yours, but I respect the word order and the hoo.
"For as a gate in his soul, so he is. 'Eat and drink', he says to you, but his heart is not with you."
A less literal translation, following the structure of NET or NIV, but with the meaning of "gate" instead of "calculating":
For he is the kind of man who switches on and off his feeling. 'Eat and drink', he will say to you, but his heart is not with you.

“As it were a gate in his life, so he ‘Eat and drink’ may say to you without his heart being with you.” is legal English, but bad writing.
The "he" should follow the quote unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, and I don't see one.

English poetry can also have words in the “wrong” order.

It is much worse in Hebrew than in English because:
1. The English punctuation makes the meaning clear.
2. The pronoun should not be there in Hebrew because it is already included in the verb. In English the pronoun cannot be omitted.

There are plenty of Biblical Hebrew sentences that have a redundant personal pronoun. Especially in conversation.

3. In English "He" cannot be the subject of the verbs "eat" and "drink". But in unvoweled Hebrew, "eat" and "drink" can be 3ms perfect, so the reader would have to do a second or 3rd pass to figure out that hoo is not the subject of eat and drink. That is bad writing to make a reader do that.

You haven’t read much Biblical Hebrew poetry, have you? There are many verses where I have to do two, three, four passes to find out what are the subject, object, verb, etc. and even then I may still not understand it.

If the writer's intention was that hoo should be the subject of omar, then he should have placed it closer to omar and not before "eat and drink", or not include it at all.

Oh?

This was a good discussion with you and Ste. I learned a lot. Thanks!

Thank you for the discussion.

Karl W. Randolph.