kwrandolph wrote:SteveMiller wrote:kwrandolph wrote:
It looks as if you’re desperately trying to hang onto “so he is,”. While I like that idea, “so he is,”, I see no grammatical nor linguistic support for that reading.
That's what it says in a straight forward reading similar to 1Sam 25:25 or Jos 2:21.
Neither of these is poetry, so neither of these is the same as this verse in Proverbs.
True, but wouldn't those 2 verses offer some linguistic support?
kwrandolph wrote: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".
kwrandolph wrote:Even the 1 Samuel 25:25 is not that clean an example, as כשמו כן הוא נבל שמו “as his name, so he is recognized as a fool” the שמו being a participle of a verb that has no exact translation into English, therefore we have to make a free translation to make it understandable in English.
Wouldn't the verb need to be niphal to give your meaning?
1 Sam 25:25b is very similar in structure to Prov 23:7
For as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name and folly is with him.
Every literal translation that I have seen translates it that way.
kwrandolph wrote:SteveMiller wrote:I figure it's probably impossible to do a search for such a thing, but from your memory is there ever such a case where the subject is separated from the verb "to speak" or "say" by the words spoken? If I see that, then I won't hang on to "so he is", but without any data, I can't buy the alternative.
The word
כן is found over 500 times in Tanakh.
The word
אמר in an electronic search is found over 4500 times.
Yes, it would take some time to do a good search on either term. That’s not counting that one should search
דבר as well.
What do you think of Isaiah 59:21? Or Isaiah 66:9? Amos 1:13–15?
If it was important, the way I would do a search would be to limit the search to just Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and maybe Job.
But it doesn't warrant that kind of effort.
In the 2 verses in Isaiah, the
אֲנִ֗י is part of the quote, so it is entirely different. The speaker follows the verb
אָמַ֣ר.
I don't see what you're getting at with Amos 1:13-15.
kwrandolph wrote: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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
This was a good discussion with you and Ste. I learned a lot. Thanks!