חול or חלל

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Galena
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חול or חלל

Post by Galena »

חול or חלל In Deut 32:18 which root please for this word מחללך because I find no listing for either root under even-shoshan and Gesenius says chet-lamed-lamed while strongs lists the other one. Point being infuriatingly I can not find this word at all in even-shoshan and this really is a first for me. I checked double checked triple and quadruple checked, even went to this website for help http://www.tanakhml.org/d21.php2xml?sfr ... &enc=&xml= but it does not help you in that way...so now I feel I am about to be 'stupified' by something darn obvious that I have missed....
Regards
chris
Chris Watts
kwrandolph
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by kwrandolph »

Galena wrote:חול or חלל In Deut 32:18 which root please for this word מחללך because I find no listing for either root under even-shoshan
There are two roots for חלל with one referring to boring a hole and playing a musical instrument that has bored holes, and the second meaning “to make common”. Like Greek κοινος, it is used as the opposite of “set apart” αγιος, קדש both of which have a derived meaning of “holy”. A more complete write-up comes out as “to become common ⇒ to bring into production (often understood of initiating that which previously was not common or in production), ⇒ to profane (as in common, everyday, not set apart special) (opposite of קדש to set apart Jr 6:4, 22:7 ⇒ to consider or make holy)”

The participle מחלל refers to the act, person or place of “making common” or production. That makes the last portion of Deuteronomy 32:18 to read “and you forget (deliberate action) God who produced you.”
Galena wrote: and Gesenius says chet-lamed-lamed while strongs lists the other one. Point being infuriatingly I can not find this word at all in even-shoshan and this really is a first for me. I checked double checked triple and quadruple checked, even went to this website for help http://www.tanakhml.org/d21.php2xml?sfr ... &enc=&xml= but it does not help you in that way...so now I feel I am about to be 'stupified' by something darn obvious that I have missed....
Regards
chris
Forget Gesenius—he’s the reason I wrote my dictionary. Strongs was not a Hebrew scholar. It could be that Even-Shoshan didn’t understand this verse, so didn’t know where to put it.

One of the advantages of learning vocabulary according to action is that even when you find an example of that action in an unexpected place, you still understand it. But if you learn according to form according to semantic domains, when you come across an example of its usage outside of its usual semantic domain, you’ll be lost. I’ve tried to write my dictionary in such a way that those who use it can recognize actions.

More and more I’m treating Hebrew participles as nouns and not as verbal forms, I think the contexts indicate that they are nouns.

Getting back to Deuteronomy 32:18, we have poetry, we have a parallelism, so a somewhat smoothed translation comes out as “You put out of mind the Rock that brought you forth, and forget God who produced you.”

The graphene מחלל also comes from מ+חלל and from the meaning of playing an instrument with bored holes. Context tells us which of the three meanings that we can expect.

Karl W. Randolph.
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Galena
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by Galena »

This is precisely what I began to do some time ago, learn words within actions rather than semantic categories, interesting that you mentioned this because that is how I learned Dutch (without realising it at the time). I am curious though, you wrote a dictionary?

Before I posted the question about the root I saw in this word a multitude of meanings; I could not pin down a translation when I saw the three letters חלל sticking out at me: I read 'Forget', I then read - you have hollowed out the God who created you IE - have taken bits out to suit your own imaginations, I also read - you have 'done the opposite of sanctifying me" and I also saw the "pierced" and thought of Isaiah 53. So just in case I was taking things too far I thought that maybe I should check to see what the scholarly accepted root was and perhaps limit my own imagination and try to apply some sort of discipline, if you can understand what I mean.

Kind regards
Chris
ps:- I can't forget Gesenius, it is my only source of reference for 'more insight'.
Chris Watts
Jemoh66
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by Jemoh66 »

Karl,

I really like your response. Your methodology is consistent with the well recognized idea that BH is an action oriented language. That's why love is something you do, not something you feel.

Chris and Karl,

I had a funny image in my mind as I read the last two post. In a 12-holed-flute, the flute would be the nations, and the twelve holes would represent the twelve tribes taken out of the nations, carved out, so to speak. A fanciful image lol. But if you're going to produce a flute, you have to hole it out.

Jonathan Mohler
Jonathan E Mohler
Studying for a MA in Intercultural Studies
Baptist Bible Theological Seminary
kwrandolph
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by kwrandolph »

Galena wrote:This is precisely what I began to do some time ago, learn words within actions rather than semantic categories, interesting that you mentioned this because that is how I learned Dutch (without realising it at the time).
That’s how I learned German and Norwegian and studied (school level only) French. Then when I went to college, that’s how I studied Koiné Greek. Then I studied Hebrew. When I saw that Gesenius didn’t follow that pattern, I started writing “corrections” in the margins. To try to make my corrections as accurate as possible, I compared them to actual uses as found in Lisowski’s concordance.
Galena wrote:I am curious though, you wrote a dictionary?

Kind regards
Chris
ps:- I can't forget Gesenius, it is my only source of reference for 'more insight'.
Yes, I wrote a dictionary, or rather I formalized those “corrections” that were ad hoc added to the margins of my copy of Gesenius’ dictionary and later more formally in my copy of Lisowski’s concordance. I have formalized it as a pdf file, available if you send your email at which you want to receive it, at my handle for this discussion at gmail. Because this started out ad hoc, it’s rough at times. I welcome any corrections.

Karl W. Randolph. (kwrandolph)
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Galena
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by Galena »

Looked up Lisowski’s - a Lithuanian mercenary commander or a snooker player? Ah - add the word concordance that might help! But alas no English version.
Chris Watts
kwrandolph
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Re: חול or חלל

Post by kwrandolph »

Jonathan:
Jemoh66 wrote:Karl,

I really like your response. Your methodology is consistent with the well recognized idea that BH is an action oriented language. That's why love is something you do, not something you feel.

Jonathan Mohler
Here we need to be careful. Was this dynamism an intrinsic part of the language, or how it was used?

My opinion is that the dynamism comes from the way the language was used, not intrinsic to the language itself. Because it’s from the use rather than intrinsic to the language, that means that 1) it’s possible to use Hebrew in a non-dynamic fashion, and 2) it’s possible to use other languages in a similarly dynamic manner.

An example of #2 above is the Greek used in the New Testament—it uses the same dynamism in Greek as found in Hebrew in the Tanakh. While I personally have no direct knowledge of the Talmud, I have been informed by others that Hebrew and Aramaic are used in the same non-dynamic manner as was Greek among the Greek philosophers.

Now this carries over into lexicography—I try to show the action behind the lexeme, whereas most people try to show the form. Form looks at where the action takes place and how it fits in its immediate situation. Even actions are defined according to the form of the action. As a result, a lexeme can have several meanings, one to fit each situation.

But when defining according to action, often the same action can be recognized in several contexts. That is not the same as claiming that each lexeme has one and only one meaning, because there are such things as homonyms and in Hebrew also homographs, spelled the same way though may have had different pronunciations. But recognizing that actions may be used in many contexts greatly reduces the number of vocabulary one needs to learn in order to use a language.

As for translation, my experience is that seldom does a word in one language have exactly the same meaning in another, often not even in close cognate languages. Therefore, it’s common to use different words in a target language for the same word in the originating language. My goal was and is not to write a translator’s dictionary, rather one to help to understand the language as closely as a native speaker would have used it, which means recognizing the action and to try to indicate how widely that action was recognized by native speakers.

I used that method when learning modern languages, I see no reason not to use the same method when learning Biblical Hebrew.

Karl W. Randolph.
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