Where are the case endings in Hebrew?

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kwrandolph
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Re: Where are the case endings in Hebrew?

Post by kwrandolph »

Stephen Hughes wrote:Well...
That is interesting but bleak picture :? .

Now, since the Masoritic pointing is not accurate, the original pronunciation is unknown, Randall Buth's pronunciation grammar and syntax are all late, the text shows no signs of having been oral at one stage or another, the grammar that is learnt in seminaries should be unlearnt later, experts disagree on minutiae, the only thing left is vocabulary but that is difficult to acquire easily forgotten after exams and cognates are of only a little use, it is no wonder that I have been having trouble with it since my first attempts to learn the language many, many years ago.
LOL!

Now you see why I had such difficulty learning it. So much difficulty that I ended up writing my own dictionary to try to make sense of it.

Learning the vocabulary I think is about 80% of learning Biblical Hebrew, it’s at least 80% of the difficulty. The best way I can think of learning the vocabulary is to sit down and read, and after about X times of looking up the same word, and getting frustrated that it’s now X times, you start remembering it. I speak from experience.

I keep telling people that Biblical Hebrew is not as well known as some people want to claim, which makes it somewhat harder to learn.

Karl W. Randolph.
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Stephen Hughes
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Inaccuracies and error toleration.

Post by Stephen Hughes »

kwrandolph wrote:LOL!
...
Learning the vocabulary I think is about 80% of learning Biblical Hebrew, it’s at least 80% of the difficulty. ...

I keep telling people that Biblical Hebrew is not as well known as some people want to claim, which makes it somewhat harder to learn.
When I was learning to be an ESL teacher, I wanted to correct an upper-intermediate student for using a wrong tense form in reported speech. [She had used a past perfect simple in place of a past perfect continuous ie. Min said, "I was swimming on Saturday afternoon." --> Min said that she had swum on Saturday afternoon. / Min said that she had been swimming on Saturday afternoon.] But was stopped by the experienced teacher trainer, explaining that for her level of student, such a mistake (or inaccuracy) was tollerable.

For beginners, perhaps as long as something is happening in their learning, and they are making some form of progress, that is fine. Things that are a little inaccurate from a teacher's point of view, or from an advanced learner's point of view, are probably not going to phase a beginner, (or not even going to be noticed).

How much experience did you have in the Hebrew language before you became aware that there were systemic errors in dictionaries and grammars?
Stephen Hughes BA (Greek), BTh, MA (Egyptology)
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃ (Deut. 10:19)
kwrandolph
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Re: Inaccuracies and error toleration.

Post by kwrandolph »

Stephen Hughes wrote:How much experience did you have in the Hebrew language before you became aware that there were systemic errors in dictionaries and grammars?
I noticed some errors almost from the beginning, but I thought they were isolated rather than systemic. They were primarily in the area of lexicography, where because of my experience in learning foreign languages, as well as my own, that languages just don’t act in the way some glosses were listed in Gesenius and BDB, the two dictionaries then available to me. I started writing corrections in the margins. It was only after those corrections in the margins reached a critical point, I don’t remember what was the percentage of words that had corrections, that I started looking at all words with the help of a concordance. The one I have is Lisowski’s “Konkordanz zum Hebräischen Alten Testament”.

In grammar, I was taught in class that there were two ways to understand Biblical Hebrew conjugations — as tense, or as aspect — both are measures of time. “Aspect” was defined as it’s used in European languages. My professor preferred the aspect model.

The tense model doesn’t make much sense, as it tied itself in knots trying to explain such things as “prophetic perfect”, “past future” and other such difficulties. But only after I’d read Tanakh through five or six times that I concluded that the aspect model also doesn’t work. At that point I realized that I could understand 95+% of the text just by understanding the vocabulary without referring to the conjugations, so I gave up on the conjugations and just read the text another 15 times. What I hoped for was that by getting as familiar as I could with the text that I could recognize some clues for just what those conjugations stand for. I now have some tentative ideas.

So, I’d say that it took about a decade of experience before I recognized that there are systemic problems in grammar, and probably two decades before I realized that there are systemic problems in lexicography. I’m not a very fast learner, am I?

Karl W. Randolph.
Ray Harder
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Re: Hughes Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:15 am

Post by Ray Harder »

Stephen Hughes wrote: However, my question, albiet poorly worded, was I thought testing the possible orality of the Biblical tradition. I was wondering if "scripture" had been passed down by word-of-mouth before it had been written down?
Wow, you do know how to ask the hard questions! The question of the orality of any tradition is complicated mostly by the simple fact that speech leaves no physical trace in the record. It is virtually impossible to make evidence based statements about orality. So what can be said about the biblical stories and on what basis?

A gross oversimplification of this question (but evidence supported statement) would be to say why would the Hebrews write their literature when virtually no one in society could read it? Widespread literacy is a modern phenomenon. Unless you argue that the ancient Israelites were different from all other ancient cultures. There is no evidence of exceptional literacy among the ancient Israelites.

It is important to recognize that the early Hebrew bible could very well have developed from not only an oral tradition, but from multiple oral traditions. This could explain for instance the two separate Adam and Eve stories that seem to co-exist in the first few chapters of Genesis. Did God create the couple at the same time and after the animals as Gen. 1:25-27 seems to imply? Or did he create Adam and then later Eve from his rib and before the animals as Gen. 2:18-22 seems to imply? Differences like this were explained in the 19th century by the Documentary Hypothesis (variations of which are universally prevalent in secular scholarship today). They assumed different writers/editors, but these features could just as easily be explained as being two different oral traditions that were edited together by a later author/editor.

The only thing that can be said fairly definitively is that oral traditions are are almost universal in societies ancient and modern. It can be deduced that Israel was no different. In the Bible we have traditions of David singing before Saul and then later traditions that David’s songs were among among the oral traditions that became the Psalms. But the Psalms are “songs” and not “literature” you say? Is Homer’s writing literature or songs? What about the Hebrew (and foreign e.g. Balaam) prophets giving “oracles?” What about the passages that secular scholars fairly universally recognize as the oldest traditions in the Hebrew bible that seem to be songs or oracles or poems (indicating a poetic (and therefore oral?) tradition?) (E.g. the “Song of Moses” in Exodus 15, the “Song of Deborah” in Judges 5, the “Blessings” of Jacob and Moses in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 respectively, the “Oracles of Balaam” in Numbers 23 & 24, the “Poems of Moses” in Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 68, etc.)

Since those passages generally acknowledged among secular scholars and even some religious ones as the oldest tend to be “poetic,” is that evidence of orality/oral tradition? I would argue yes, but that is not a universal or even consensus view. It is still even widely debated whether there was/is “meter” in Hebrew poetry. (Which is often seen in written texts from oral cultures because stories with meter are easier to remember.)

There seems to be evidence (even in the Bible itself) that large parts of the “historical” books” were part of a state sponsored effort to record “history.” This implies that some of the OT was written “on spec” of the king/government. These would probably be written at the time of composition.

There is a curious story about “books of the law” being “discovered” in written form while renovating the temple during the reign of Josiah (c. 649-609 BC II Kgs 22:8ff), these are also called “all the law of Moses” (II Kgs 23:25) and later “the book of the law of the Lord given by Moses” (II Chron. 34:14). Taken at face value, these texts seem to imply that part or all of the Torah was written down by 600 BC or so and had been written by Moses and passed down in writing for about a millennium.

So we can definitely say that the Hebrew bible contains stories about a written tradition of text creation stretching all the way back to Moses. If we take a religious approach to the text, this settles it. The bible itself teaches that Moses WROTE the Torah. However, most secular scholars frankly discount these stories as very late in the biblical tradition when written texts were more common. Both religious and secular scholars accept the prophetic traditions in the Hebrew Bible as falling between the traditions (historical or not) of Moses and the exilic and post-exilic activity on the Hebrew Bible --whatever that was (creation/editing/transcribing from oral tradition, or....?).

A careful reading of Jeremiah shows a situation that could be a record of a transition period between an oral and a written culture that parallels what was happening in Greece around the same period. (c. 600 BC)

Jeremiah’s message was repeatedly characterized as being given orally. (E.g. Jer. 26:7 etc.) However a reoccurring character in Jeremiah is his personal scribe Baruch (E.g. “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.” עַל-מְגִלַּת-סֵפֶר Jer. 36:4) This may imply that Jeremiah couldn’t write himself, but depended on a professional scribe. (So why did he feel the need to write at all? And why was this remarkable? Could this imply a newness of the concept of written religious proclamations?) Jeremiah also records a tradition that the prophet Micah prophesied orally (Jer. 26:18). There are repeated statements of written texts like letters which had to be read to the hearers --even kings and princes (Jer. 36:21) (Implying perhaps that even the royal class couldn’t read or write.) This situation reflected in Jeremiah is exactly what we would expect in a primarily oral culture transitioning into a written one --at least at the governmental level. (As it does in most cultures, bureaucrats long before commoners.) Widespread written literacy as a social value is very much a modern phenomenon.

The archaeological record of a written tradition in Israel is complicated by simple issues like climate and choices of available materials. Jeremiah clearly implies writing on perishable materials that can be cut with a knife and burned in a fireplace (probably parchment or papyri). (Jer. 36:23)

As might be expected before the widespread use of cheap and common writing materials like papyrus, we do not find in the archaeological record personal documents such as we find in the Oxyrhinchus (1st to 6th centuries AD) or Elephantine (5th century BC) papyrii. (Where we discover letters to family members from soldiers, dinner menus for parties/banquets among the affluent, receipts for significant purchases such as slaves, personal property records, and personal tax and census forms as well as school exercises and the occasional literary document. We find all of these materials in Egypt because of climate.) These seem to be written by professional scribes for hire or students training to be scribes. But even in Egypt communities of Jews are clearly identifiable from both of these periods, but their relationship to the biblical traditions is largely speculative. There is no evidence of the Hebrew bible or its stories at Elephantine except for a reference to a passover celebration from a document dated 419 BC implying a knowledge of the Exodus tradition or a document dated 407 BC begging the government for money to rebuild a temple of YWHW implying some form of Jewish worship had developed from the Hebrew bible. However, neither of these documents implies anything about how much of what later became the Bible existed or in what form (oral or written).

I suspect that the Hebrew bible stories progressed in Israel in the same manner as in other cultures. They started out largely as oral traditions which became the foundation for religious beliefs and practices and were codified when religious, social, and political forces converged to make it necessary.

Like the Bible, the epic poems of Homer have subject matter from the mid 2nd millennium BC and a written tradition that dates from much later. Homer is almost universally recognized as originating in an oral form. Reducing these texts to writing seems to have widely begun in the 5-6th centuries BC though the extant manuscript tradition is largely from medieval times. Though no scholar to my knowledge argues for any direct connection between the early Homeric and Biblical textual traditions, I think the parallels are striking.

The most influential study of orality in the ancient world is Albert Lord’s 1960 classic “The Singer of Tales.” He studied modern oral traditions among Serbo-Croatians and largely applied his findings to Homer and not the Bible, but his methods and conclusions should be carefully studied by any who approach any question of ancient oral traditions. It is more of a sociological than textual study, but his methods and conclusions should not be ignored by any serious student of this question in any culture.
Raymond G. Harder

Forgive the length of my posts, but like H.L. Mencken said, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
kwrandolph
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Re: Hughes Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:15 am

Post by kwrandolph »

Ray Harder wrote:A gross oversimplification of this question (but evidence supported statement) would be to say why would the Hebrews write their literature when virtually no one in society could read it? Widespread literacy is a modern phenomenon. Unless you argue that the ancient Israelites were different from all other ancient cultures. There is no evidence of exceptional literacy among the ancient Israelites.
I have to object at this point. Whether or not a society was literate had more to do with the value a society put on literacy, and the difficulty in learning the writing system, not the era in which they lived.

The evidence I’ve seen indicates that the Scandinavians were literate, almost totally, from about 2000 years ago. The runes were easy to learn and apply to spoken language.

Even though Jesus was just a carpenter, we see in his visit to his home synagog that he was expected to be able to read. That suggests universal education 2000 years ago in Judea. If it was expected then, when reading was done in a cognate language to what they spoke, why assume that 1500 years earlier that the majority of people were illiterate in their own language?
Ray Harder wrote:It is important to recognize that the early Hebrew bible could very well have developed from not only an oral tradition, but from multiple oral traditions. This could explain for instance the two separate Adam and Eve stories that seem to co-exist in the first few chapters of Genesis. Did God create the couple at the same time and after the animals as Gen. 1:25-27 seems to imply? Or did he create Adam and then later Eve from his rib and before the animals as Gen. 2:18-22 seems to imply? Differences like this were explained in the 19th century by the Documentary Hypothesis (variations of which are universally prevalent in secular scholarship today). They assumed different writers/editors, but these features could just as easily be explained as being two different oral traditions that were edited together by a later author/editor.
This interpretation goes against what we know about Biblical Hebrew language.

Biblical Hebrew conjugations did NOT conjugate for tense. Just because something is mentioned later, doesn’t mean that it happened later. There are reasons that some events are mentioned out of sequence. Whereas English can indicate the order of events mentioned out of sequence by its conjugations, Biblical Hebrew lacked that ability.

The first chapter gives a sequential list of events, the second chapter focuses on what the man did.
Ray Harder wrote:The only thing that can be said fairly definitively is that oral traditions are are almost universal in societies ancient and modern. It can be deduced that Israel was no different.
While all societies have oral traditions, some societies are also literate.
Ray Harder wrote:In the Bible we have traditions of David singing before Saul and then later traditions that David’s songs were among among the oral traditions that became the Psalms.
Not all the psalms by a long shot were written by David. And in the written record, there’s no indication that the songs that David sang before Saul were songs that ended up among the psalms.
Ray Harder wrote:But the Psalms are “songs” and not “literature” you say? Is Homer’s writing literature or songs? What about the Hebrew (and foreign e.g. Balaam) prophets giving “oracles?” What about the passages that secular scholars fairly universally recognize as the oldest traditions in the Hebrew bible that seem to be songs or oracles or poems (indicating a poetic (and therefore oral?) tradition?) (E.g. the “Song of Moses” in Exodus 15, the “Song of Deborah” in Judges 5, the “Blessings” of Jacob and Moses in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 respectively, the “Oracles of Balaam” in Numbers 23 & 24, the “Poems of Moses” in Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 68, etc.)
If we allow that Genesis was written compiling older documents, we find a literary tradition that posits that Genesis 1:1–2:4 is the oldest section. The next oldest is Genesis 2:5 – 5:2, the next Genesis 5:3 – 6:9. And so forth.

“Secular scholars” are not that secular, rather they have a religion based on evolution, and it’s based on that religion that they speculate on the ages of those songs. They have no evidence other than their religion that their speculations are correct.
Ray Harder wrote:Since those passages generally acknowledged among secular scholars and even some religious ones as the oldest tend to be “poetic,” is that evidence of orality/oral tradition? I would argue yes, but that is not a universal or even consensus view. It is still even widely debated whether there was/is “meter” in Hebrew poetry. (Which is often seen in written texts from oral cultures because stories with meter are easier to remember.)
Meter is a different subject, but I think there was meter in those songs.
Ray Harder wrote:There seems to be evidence (even in the Bible itself) that large parts of the “historical” books” were part of a state sponsored effort to record “history.” This implies that some of the OT was written “on spec” of the king/government. These would probably be written at the time of composition.
It looks as if both the books of Kings and Chronicles were condensations based on those official records.

<snip>
Ray Harder wrote:Jeremiah’s message was repeatedly characterized as being given orally. (E.g. Jer. 26:7 etc.) However a reoccurring character in Jeremiah is his personal scribe Baruch (E.g. “Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which He had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.” עַל-מְגִלַּת-סֵפֶר Jer. 36:4) This may imply that Jeremiah couldn’t write himself, but depended on a professional scribe. (So why did he feel the need to write at all? And why was this remarkable? Could this imply a newness of the concept of written religious proclamations?) Jeremiah also records a tradition that the prophet Micah prophesied orally (Jer. 26:18). There are repeated statements of written texts like letters which had to be read to the hearers --even kings and princes (Jer. 36:21) (Implying perhaps that even the royal class couldn’t read or write.) This situation reflected in Jeremiah is exactly what we would expect in a primarily oral culture transitioning into a written one --at least at the governmental level. (As it does in most cultures, bureaucrats long before commoners.) Widespread written literacy as a social value is very much a modern phenomenon.
That doesn’t take into account the widespread practice in literate societies before the invention of word processors, that people were hired as scribes because of their beautiful handwriting to do the actual writing. This practice lasted even through the typewriter era.

In Jeremiah 51:60 after Jeremiah was kidnapped to Egypt and Baruch was in captivity in Babylon, Jeremiah himself wrote documents that he sent to Babylon.
Ray Harder wrote:The archaeological record of a written tradition in Israel is complicated by simple issues like climate and choices of available materials. Jeremiah clearly implies writing on perishable materials that can be cut with a knife and burned in a fireplace (probably parchment or papyri). (Jer. 36:23)

<snip>

I suspect that the Hebrew bible stories progressed in Israel in the same manner as in other cultures. They started out largely as oral traditions which became the foundation for religious beliefs and practices and were codified when religious, social, and political forces converged to make it necessary.

Like the Bible, the epic poems of Homer have subject matter from the mid 2nd millennium BC and a written tradition that dates from much later. Homer is almost universally recognized as originating in an oral form. Reducing these texts to writing seems to have widely begun in the 5-6th centuries BC though the extant manuscript tradition is largely from medieval times. Though no scholar to my knowledge argues for any direct connection between the early Homeric and Biblical textual traditions, I think the parallels are striking.
How long a period was there between when the events Homer sung about, and Homer? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was no more than one or two generations. One clue is the number of generations between Odin and his ancestor who was a son-in-law to King Priem — they add up to about 800 years, give or take about a century. There are other clues from other sources that point to about the same time.

Yet the speculation concerning a supposed oral tradition for the Torah is much longer. Given the recorded widespread apostasy even among the priests, it’s unlikely that such a complex history as recorded in Torah would have survived more than one or two generations without being written down.
Ray Harder wrote:The most influential study of orality in the ancient world is Albert Lord’s 1960 classic “The Singer of Tales.” He studied modern oral traditions among Serbo-Croatians and largely applied his findings to Homer and not the Bible, but his methods and conclusions should be carefully studied by any who approach any question of ancient oral traditions. It is more of a sociological than textual study, but his methods and conclusions should not be ignored by any serious student of this question in any culture.
The written record is that Moses wrote Torah — Genesis compiled from older documents, and the rest original to him. There’s no indication of an oral tradition later written down, as with Homer. There’s no reason to assume that Jews in Moses’ time were illiterate as a people, seeing as the alphabetic writing was known long before the Exodus. Therefore, it seems that it is stronger to say that Moses wrote Torah, than that there was a period of oral tradition that lasted centuries.

Karl W. Randolph.
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Stephen Hughes
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Re: Inaccuracies and error tolleration

Post by Stephen Hughes »

kwrandolph wrote: I’m not a very fast learner, am I?
Learning a language well generally takes time. What can be said is that you must have been an alert and questioning learner.

It has been almost 3 decades since I first tried to study Hebrew, and so far there have been few returns for the investment.

Having rejected the aspect / tense basis for understanding Hebrew, you must have adopted another basis. In a rudimentary way, the recognition of patterns (and exceptions) is the basis of grammar. I can understand what you are saying about grammar for one language not matching well with the understanding of another language by analogy. When I first arrived in China, my way of recognising faces was no longer valid. I had to take a long time to adjust my "facial recognition software" to recognise those arround me who I should have recognised more readily. Now, of course, I have overcome that problem. Degrees of variation between features, and what degree of variance constituted a difference was something that I had to re-learn to be able to communicate about people with others effectively. I am still nowhere in the ballpark with colours, but that will be my next ten year plan.
Stephen Hughes BA (Greek), BTh, MA (Egyptology)
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃ (Deut. 10:19)
kwrandolph
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Re: Inaccuracies and error tolleration

Post by kwrandolph »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
kwrandolph wrote: I’m not a very fast learner, am I?
Learning a language well generally takes time. What can be said is that you must have been an alert and questioning learner.

It has been almost 3 decades since I first tried to study Hebrew, and so far there have been few returns for the investment.
Actually, I didn’t set out to study Hebrew, I set out to study Tanakh. It just so happened that the only English translation we had in the house was in an archaic form of English that was almost as difficult to understand as taking out my dictionary and reading Tanakh in Hebrew. So I took out my dictionary and started reading.

My grandfather also encouraged me to read in Hebrew.

Well, I had taken one year of Hebrew language in class before that, a class I never intended to study. So at least I had a foundation to start my reading.
Stephen Hughes wrote:Having rejected the aspect / tense basis for understanding Hebrew, you must have adopted another basis. In a rudimentary way, the recognition of patterns (and exceptions) is the basis of grammar.
I recognized the forms, I just didn’t know what they represented.

But as I wrote before, knowing the vocabulary alone with recognizing its conjugation forms already gives a significant ability towards understanding the language.
Stephen Hughes wrote:I can understand what you are saying about grammar for one language not matching well with the understanding of another language by analogy. When I first arrived in China, my way of recognising faces was no longer valid. I had to take a long time to adjust my "facial recognition software" to recognise those arround me who I should have recognised more readily. Now, of course, I have overcome that problem. Degrees of variation between features, and what degree of variance constituted a difference was something that I had to re-learn to be able to communicate about people with others effectively. I am still nowhere in the ballpark with colours, but that will be my next ten year plan.
You were in China? I suppose you also speak Chinese. An easy language to learn to speak, hard to read.

I live in a city that’s about 40% Chinese, 15% other east Asian, so when I visited China, I had no problem recognizing people. I needed that skill already in my own city.

Karl W. Randolph.
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Stephen Hughes
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What is Tanakh?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

kwrandolph wrote:I didn’t set out to study Hebrew, I set out to study Tanakh.
What is Tanakh? Is Tanakh a dialect or language related to Hebrew?

[The only thing I know that is similar to that is in Coptic (Sahidic dialect I seem to recall) ta-ankh would be "my life". ]
kwrandolph wrote:I suppose you also speak Chinese. An easy language to learn to speak, hard to read.
For what it's worth, I can read functionally in some situations. Learning hieroglyphics before learning Chinese was helpful to understand how radicals and sound work together.
Stephen Hughes BA (Greek), BTh, MA (Egyptology)
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃ (Deut. 10:19)
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Chapter divisions - a religion based on evolution?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

kwrandolph wrote:
Ray Harder wrote:But the Psalms are “songs” and not “literature” you say? Is Homer’s writing literature or songs? What about the Hebrew (and foreign e.g. Balaam) prophets giving “oracles?” What about the passages that secular scholars fairly universally recognize as the oldest traditions in the Hebrew bible that seem to be songs or oracles or poems (indicating a poetic (and therefore oral?) tradition?) (E.g. the “Song of Moses” in Exodus 15, the “Song of Deborah” in Judges 5, the “Blessings” of Jacob and Moses in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 respectively, the “Oracles of Balaam” in Numbers 23 & 24, the “Poems of Moses” in Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 68, etc.)
If we allow that Genesis was written compiling older documents, we find a literary tradition that posits that Genesis 1:1–2:4 is the oldest section. The next oldest is Genesis 2:5 – 5:2, the next Genesis 5:3 – 6:9. And so forth.

“Secular scholars” are not that secular, rather they have a religion based on evolution, and it’s based on that religion that they speculate on the ages of those songs. They have no evidence other than their religion that their speculations are correct.
Karl are you saying that the chapter divisions are inaccurate?

What is this "secular scholars ... have a religion based on evolution" section about? :?
Stephen Hughes BA (Greek), BTh, MA (Egyptology)
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃ (Deut. 10:19)
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What is your basis for the Hebrew verbal system?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

kwrandolph wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:Having rejected the aspect / tense basis for understanding Hebrew, you must have adopted another basis. In a rudimentary way, the recognition of patterns (and exceptions) is the basis of grammar.
I recognized the forms, I just didn’t know what they represented.

But as I wrote before, knowing the vocabulary alone with recognizing its conjugation forms already gives a significant ability towards understanding the language.
I mean what do you now feel that the basis of understanding Hebrew verbs is? (If it is not tense and aspect, what underlies the differentiation of the verbal system? What basis do you use for your understanding of difference and similarity?)

Studying words will give you an understanding of both meaning words (aka "contentives") and some grammatical words (aka "functors"), but not of how the grammar system works together as a langauge.
Stephen Hughes BA (Greek), BTh, MA (Egyptology)
וַאֲהַבְתֶּ֖ם אֶת־הַגֵּ֑ר כִּֽי־גֵרִ֥ים הֱיִיתֶ֖ם בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃ (Deut. 10:19)
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