Re: Biblical Hebrew vocabulary
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 12:27 pm
Dear Karl,
I consider the Masoretic text as data: results of the work of certain scribes around 900 AD.
It is a curious combination of materials with vast temporal distances between their origins. And the most fascinating is that the vowels are so much younger than the consonants.
I am not a Hebrew scholar myself, although I have spent a full year reading 50 chapters in 1&2 Samuel, with a Gesenius, a grammar, some commentaries and a computer.
So I am not "critical" towards these sources, but I appreciate that there are inconsistencies there, and at all levels in the history of these texts.
People in the Amsterdam group try to use clues in language structure and use for more precise dating of certain books and chapters, and there the database helps. For that type of research the pointing is indeed as good as irrelevant.
My role is to model all that data in ways that others can make use of it, and combine and recombine it with other relevant data.
Best,
Dirk Roorda
I consider the Masoretic text as data: results of the work of certain scribes around 900 AD.
It is a curious combination of materials with vast temporal distances between their origins. And the most fascinating is that the vowels are so much younger than the consonants.
I am not a Hebrew scholar myself, although I have spent a full year reading 50 chapters in 1&2 Samuel, with a Gesenius, a grammar, some commentaries and a computer.
So I am not "critical" towards these sources, but I appreciate that there are inconsistencies there, and at all levels in the history of these texts.
People in the Amsterdam group try to use clues in language structure and use for more precise dating of certain books and chapters, and there the database helps. For that type of research the pointing is indeed as good as irrelevant.
My role is to model all that data in ways that others can make use of it, and combine and recombine it with other relevant data.
Best,
Dirk Roorda