Masoretes and their lack of knowledge?

[Galena]

Hi Isaac, so allow me, permit me to make a little observation here: If you were to contribute more in this manner of style:

One may indeed "amend" בָּצַע to בֶּצַע, but then one would have to put a comma after it. Thus:
כֵּן אָרְחוֹת כָּל בֹּצֵעַ בֶּצַע, אֶת נֶפֶשׁ בְּעָלָיו יִקָּח
perfectly rendered by KJV as: "So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof."

and do a lot less of this style of writing:

יִקָּח = היא-קח, where the fore-attached היא, 'he',

Your posts would be so much more interesting and food for the hungry that is digestible
I understand what you are saying with the latter, but it does not seem to have much support that I can discover, plausible I agree, but is it really accepted anywhere else amongst biblical scholars?

Anyway, why would a seghol make any difference actually, I do not see any difference grammatically in this slight change of pronounciation?

Kind regards

[Isaac Fried]

Chris,

1. Because this "this slight change of pronounciation" enters a possible distinction between a verb an a noun.

2. יִקָּח = היא-קח, where the fore-attached היא, 'he', refers to the בֹּצֵעַ בֶּצַע, the "greedy of gain", is the essence of Hebrew. In my opinion there is no true understanding of the Hebrew language without understanding this breakup of the Hebrew word. I have not checked yet to see if this is "really accepted anywhere else amongst biblical scholars". For what? I have always known this is obviously true, and never heard a scholar saying it is wrong.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[S_Walch]

Very briefly Psalm 145 and the missing verse that should begin with a nun. Many translations have manufactured an imaginary verse out of arrogance or simply a sense of misplaced duty in believing that they know better and have mistrusted the masoretes reliability.

Or better yet, the Masoretes did indeed make a mistake and omitted the verse beginning with the nun.

Not surprisingly, the DSS includes the verse (11QPsaa (Great Psalms Scroll) pg 715 in book; look at the end of line 2); a verse which is also preserved by the LXX.

"Translations" haven't manufactured an imaginary anything here - they've got 2000+ year old evidence backing them up, in two languages.

[Isaac Fried]

To amplify on it somewhat. "Once upon a time" it used to be היא קח, 'he take.' Then fluency brought them together into היאקח. Then haste and economy dropped the ה to bring about the concise final form יקח. In today's speech הוּא and היא are commonly heard as but אוּ U and אִי I.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Isaac Fried]

Ste says
Or better yet, the Masoretes did indeed make a mistake and omitted the verse beginning with the nun
says I
Or possibly the "Masoretes" intentionally removed this verse as they suspected the purity, or authenticity, of the their reference text.
The MT is, in my opinion, far superior, to the DSS version. Wherefrom the LXX got their translation only god knows.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

[Galena]

S-Walch wrote: Or better yet, the Masoretes did indeed make a mistake and omitted the verse beginning with the nun.

This is impossible! What on earth would their motivation be for omitting a whole verse, this kind of conjecture is absurd. You would really have to stretch the imagination for believing this. Their very dedication precludes such an argument. What? Do you not think that if they wanted to omit this one verse that they would then not have substituted another one for themselves to cover up their tracks, come on now - please! It's an alphabetically ordered poem.

S_walch wrote: Not surprisingly, the DSS includes the verse (11QPsaa (Great Psalms Scroll) pg 715 in book; look at the end of line 2); a verse which is also preserved by the LXX.

You are right here, not surprisingly, the LXX and DSS are secondary in authority, I understand many DSS scrolls were considered faulty by the authors themselves, I had read (correct me please if I am mistaken) but I did read that they did not destroy certain scrolls that they considered faulty. The LXX is hardly to be considered reliable, useful maybe, this is my conclusion after reading about its history and development.

S_Walch wrote: "Translations" haven't manufactured an imaginary anything here - they've got 2000+ year old evidence backing them up, in two languages.

A document older than another does not mean that it is more trustworthy, any common sense will tell you this. The LXX was written in Greek, from what I understand the translation is filled with faults. Translating the hebrew into greek was not without its complications. I have read enough to draw the conclusion that while both the LXX and certain DSS scrolls are very useful indeed any reliance upon them as being more accurate than the sources used by the masoretes leads to error. It often boils down to: if we don't understand something and these two documents agree then they must be right.

As I said, the age of the LXX does in no way mean that it has more authority. The inclusion of the 'nun' verse in LXX and DSS is a testament to the author's bewilderment at seeing it missing. I could refer you to an English poem that does the same thing, and in 200 years time some idiot will come along and insist that the author missed a line, fill one in and then 100 years later this will be copied. Then 200 years later it will be copied again. And then 500 years later, after all this the original poem will be written down faithfully. Trouble here is that now you will get the original poem 1000 years newer than the three other erroneous poems 1000 years older.
Kind regards
chris

[Jemoh66]

This is just silliness. You got one fellow saying they omitted on purpose. LOL. The other guy saying they made a mistake. Hello. What about the common sense third option:
Their MSS had lost the nun verse. Simple. The DSS are older and had not lost it yet. Everybody wins. The LXX had even older MSS than DSS. What is so hard about this?

Jonathan Mohler

[kwrandolph]

Chris:

Hallo again Karl

Galena wrote:
The masoretes have every reason to be respected and any mistake should not be automatically viewed as an error, Psalm 145 is a classic example where the intellectuals and the scholars in all their knowledge failed to see the most simplest thing.

Karl replied: I have no idea of what you are talking in this example.

Very briefly Psalm 145 and the missing verse that should begin with a nun.

I downloaded a book that includes the DSS readings of Biblical books. It has much of Psalm 145, including the verse that reads, נאמן אלהים בדבריו וחסיד בכול מעשיו ברוך יהוה וברוך שמו לעולם ועד . If that verse is missing in the MT, it certainly looks like a typo (copyist error).

… but that missing verse is intentional and if you are interested just email me, the explanations are simple.

Seeing as it’s in the DSS, and the pattern says that it should be there, it certainly doesn’t look intentional that it’s missing.

Right now to Provers 1:19
כֵּן אָרְחוֹת כָּל־בֹּצֵעַ בָּצַע אֶת־נֶפֶשׁ בְּעָלָיו יִקָּח׃ I know what this says in English, unfortunately and to be honest, despite my myriad of reference books I can not find out what a qal perfect verb following a participle means, (it's hard to look these things up in an index and infuriating when you are trying to learn specifics).

You know it’s not a Qal Perfect, because there’s no perfect in Biblical Hebrew.

Anyway, having studied every dot I see no problem at all. What is the problem. It all looks perfectly fine to me.I see how in the hebrew the last verb יִקָּחrefers back to the qal perfect בָּצַע indicating that those who do the evil are the ones whose souls are being taken away. The whole of verse 19 closes verses 10 - 18. I looked hard, I can not see anything wrong at all. I wait with expectant agony to what you are about to let loose upon my uneducated senses.....

I don’t count you as uneducated, rather I count you as taking an extreme stance in support of the Masoretes, a stance that is not supported by the evidence. You are not the only one who takes such a stance.

Kind regards
chris

Proverbs is a book written in poetry. Most verses are written as two sentences in parallel, though with some one needs to take two or more verses to complete the parallelism.

Proverbs 1:19 consists of two sentences in parallel.

The first: כן ארחות כל בצע with the כן including its often inferred “to be”. בצע is a noun pointed as a participle (most participles are really nouns in Biblical Hebrew usage) indicating that this is the actor, an actor who is in the process of getting a cut (of the loot). A “cut” can be either positive as legitimate earnings, or negative as from loot, the context tells us which.

The second: בצע את נפש בעליו יקח. The word בצע is not a verb, rather a noun. It’s the subject of the sentence, the verb is יקח with the object being את נפש בעליו complete with accusative marker. If בצע is not a noun and subject of the sentence, then we have an incomplete sentence that has no subject. Seeing as this would be an object and not an actor, this would be a shegolate noun.

Taking the verse as a whole, the author has not only taken two sentences, but mirrored them with the added benefit that the words in the middle come from the same root, to wit: “Such are the roads of those who take a cut (of the loot), a cut (of the loot) the life of its owner takes.”

S-Walch wrote: Or better yet, the Masoretes did indeed make a mistake and omitted the verse beginning with the nun.

This is impossible!

No it is possible, from more than one possibility. One possibility is that the verse turned up missing between the time of the DSS and the Masoretes, so that the Masoretes were dealing from a damaged text.

What on earth would their motivation be for omitting a whole verse,

Accident, mistake, not deliberate.

this kind of conjecture is absurd.

This defense of the Masoretes is getting absurd.

You would really have to stretch the imagination for believing this. Their very dedication precludes such an argument. What? Do you not think that if they wanted to omit this one verse that they would then not have substituted another one for themselves to cover up their tracks, come on now - please! It's an alphabetically ordered poem.

There were centuries after the DSS and before the Masoretes, and the verse could have turned up missing before the Masoretes, so it was not the fault of the Masoretes. We’re speculating here—the text of the verse was found in the DSS, it is missing in the MT—why? We don’t know.

S_walch wrote: Not surprisingly, the DSS includes the verse (11QPsaa (Great Psalms Scroll) pg 715 in book; look at the end of line 2); a verse which is also preserved by the LXX.

You are right here, not surprisingly, the LXX and DSS are secondary in authority,

I take the MT as secondary to the DSS. While the orthography on some of the MSS was second rate, the words often clear up difficult passages in the MT.

The LXX I take as secondary to both the DSS and MT.

S_Walch wrote: "Translations" haven't manufactured an imaginary anything here - they've got 2000+ year old evidence backing them up, in two languages.

A document older than another does not mean that it is more trustworthy, any common sense will tell you this.

If older were the only argument, it might stand. However in this particular case, we have other clues that say that the MT is defective.

The LXX was written in Greek, from what I understand the translation is filled with faults. Translating the hebrew into greek was not without its complications. I have read enough to draw the conclusion that while both the LXX and certain DSS scrolls are very useful indeed any reliance upon them as being more accurate than the sources used by the masoretes leads to error.

That is an extreme statement, you’ll have to back it up.

It often boils down to: if we don't understand something and these two documents agree then they must be right.

The doctrines of Verbal Inspiration and Scriptural Inerrancy do not claim that the texts that we have now are without error, rather that the original autographs were without error. Those who made the copies made mistakes, mostly unintentionally. It is our job to try to recognize those mistakes and what were the original readings. Often that attempt is not successful.

For example, in Psalm 22:17 the MT has the word כארי which means “as a lion”, a noun. But the syntax and grammar indicate that that word should be a verb, not a noun. The LXX has it as a verb. A scrap of manuscript from the time of the DSS was found that has כארו which is a verb. כאר has the meaning of to distort, as in twisting into unnatural shapes, as would be done when a spike is pounded through a wrist crushing nerves and tendons. So, do we go with the MT which has a nonsense reading, or all the others which all agree?

Kind regards
chris

Karl W. Randolph.

[Galena]

As far as this thread is concerned I have been carried away by trying to appeal to reason, due to my lack of training I am not equipped to argue professionally as others here might well be able to. Though by reading and searching on what others have said through the years I have formed a perspective, I also turn to Rabbinical sources for explanations, especially on language issues. So I am eager to deal with each case as it arises (as I have done in the past), so I would like to keep this thread focused on examples, dealing case by case.

Karl said: For example, in Psalm 22:17 the MT has the word כארי which means “as a lion”, a noun. But the syntax and grammar indicate that that word should be a verb, not a noun. The LXX has it as a verb. A scrap of manuscript from the time of the DSS was found that has כארו which is a verb. כאר has the meaning of to distort, as in twisting into unnatural shapes, as would be done when a spike is pounded through a wrist crushing nerves and tendons. So, do we go with the MT which has a nonsense reading, or all the others which all agree?

Personally it was easy for me to be convinced that there is here a mistake by the masoretes, in fact I can understand why on this occasion they changed the letters to make a verb. I have read a number of arguments on both sides this morning, reading carefully the for and against. Rabbinical, christian and neutral sources. For me it's simple, it is split 55:45 neither side can produce the definitive answer, and I respect both sides and see clearly that neither can prove anything absolutely, except that I feel the noun community does have an edge, and so as a result of this I turn to my last line of beliefs:

1. My own sensitivity to poetry and what I have read about how poetry can be written;
2. The belief that it is written like that for a reason, even if I do not comprehend fully.
2. My slant towards rejecting the DSS and LXX as having the final authority and my belief that this has often proven to be man imposing his judgement on a script that he did not fully understand and so amended.
4. Older does not mean more accurate, I have made this clear.

After reading all the evidence and arguments I see no problem with the lack of a verb, if this was a narrative then I would have to question it more, but it is poetry and the absence of the verb takes the meaning deeper. David was the one being surrounded, yet while this is prophetic to the sufferings of the messiah the wisdom of the choice of words here have managed to encapsulate a double meaning. David would have had no reason at all to use the idea of pierced. Yet as lion at my feet and and hands ie a euphemism for the whole body as I understood it. Yet here we have a double meaning being employed creatively and prophetically without David realising it. (this is proven in other areas of scripture where absence and apparent breaking of grammatical rules is a creative style in scripture); The absence of a verb is sometimes employed to maintain a lack of movement (Psalm 1 does the same thing), it is David who is caught and trapped, the sense here is one of ready to pounce, rather than having actually been physically attacked. I see even a more simpler explanation along side the ready to pounce feeling. "As a lion my hands and my feet" could also allude to a kind of feeling of ' Hey look, look, I am the lion, look at my hands and feet" this is also prophetic, Jesus the Lion of the tribe of Judah, hanging on the cross, and people LOOKING, that is what they did. There is a deeper emphasis intended more than just the fact that nails were driven into His body. So the absence of a doing here and more of a Looking.

The problem with this verse is that as we read it we are expecting, no, we are anticipating a logical conclusion to being trapped and chased, we expect to see something within our grammatical understanding. But poetry often surprises us with the unexpected, and it is this shock of having our expectations confused that is the creative power behind poetic style. We are left 'hanging' (excuse the pun) in this verse, we are left confounded, no verb of action, just a stand still and contemplate, look, ponder, wonder.

The following verse: אֲסַפֵּר כָּל־עַצְמוֹתָי הֵמָּה יַבִּיטוּ יִרְאוּ־בִי I count all my bones, they, they look at me they gaze at me
appears to be a naturally flowing idea from where everyone has stood still in the previous verse.

They will look upon me whom they have pierced? and again... To thomas and many others He showed them his hands and his feet?

Sometimes, occasionally, in the face of difficulty, we need to remove our grammatical spectacles and allow scripture to speak, and just to walk with it, when the hebrew does not make sense then I am failing to grasp, just for that particular moment, the mindset of the writer. Grammar is only a skeleton, its the flesh and sinews that give it life.

kind regards
chris

As an after thought maybe I could demonstrate something; Let's say I am writing a poem about being chased down a road by thugs with baseball bats and knives - something like this:
and they chased me
anger and rage
down the alley they trapped me
they encircled me
against the wall
like a prey my arms and my legs

or would some author come along and say, Mmm that last verse should really read:...they broke my arms and my legs

Does not the impact lay in the sudden abruptness, where the writer has by-passed the obvious and is forcing the reader to look at/ to consider the outcome more dramatically due to an absence of movement where this very absence of a verb indicates the death, the loss of life, the stillness?

[Isaac Fried]

Chris,

What you say is reasonable a sensible. Kudos also to the "Masoretes" for avoiding the כָּאַרוּ, which is utterly מְכוֹעָר MKOAR, 'ugly', and out of place.

Isaac Fried, Boston University