Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Some thoughts on the Hebrew corpus

Some thoughts on the Hebrew corpus

Serving the Word: Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? — blog post.

One of the questions of concern to me is just how reliable are our conjectures about the Hebrew language, its syntax and word meanings, when the text corpus is so small? Future linguists would be handicapped in reconstructing the range of 21st century English from the Penguin Pocket Dictionary, as the author rhetorically implies.
This dearth of materials is the main impetus to scholars turning to cognate languages such as Ugaritic, Moabite, and to some extent Arabic. Studying these languages has clarified many textual problems already.
However, not many of the extinct cognate languages would have been decyphered had not various "Rosetta Stone"-like discoveries been unearthed. In the case of ancient Egyptian, the texts would be today meaningless without the fortuitous discovery of ancient interlinears. If a minimally represented language is difficult or impossible to read without these rare interlinears then, logically, to extrapolate to a wider lexicon from a small corpus must be accepted only after much evidence presents itself.
I'm thinking of the Logos 3.0a Lexham Hebrew-English Interlinear (the latest beta and RC revision). In Gen_1:1, they add the notation that b · r šyt is in the "state construct form." Many translations, like the NAB, agree, and they translate:
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, (NAB)
In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth— (YLT)

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, (NRSV)

In the beginning, when God created the universe, (GNB)
The NET Bible states in their "tn" footnote to this verse:
The translation assumes that the form translated "beginning" is in the absolute state rather than the construct ("in the beginning of," or "when God created"). In other words, the clause in Gen_1:1 is a main clause, Gen_1:2 has three clauses that are descriptive and supply background information, and Gen_1:3 begins the narrative sequence proper. The referent of the word "beginning" has to be defined from the context since there is no beginning or ending with God.
Whether construct or absolute, whether you plead that all the other occurrences are construct, or whether you argue Gen_1:1 is a special case, only additional evidence engendered by new research employing new ideas may settle the question. I recently saw a graphic of an interlinear from "Towards a General Model for Interlinear Text," Cathy Bow, Baden Hughes and Steven Bird University of Melbourne" where b · r šyt is glossed as "head," and the Hebrew word for "create" is glossed "cut."
Such interesting tidbits make me think that perhaps the mythological battle between chaos and order, as reflected in Canaanite and earlier myths, was lost or censored. Imagine that the "mythological" background "before" the beginning might have been left off, censoring a reference to some goddess like Tiamat being slain. Thus, experimentally, Gen_1:1 might be interlineared:
from-her-head severs elohim — the-heavens and — the-earth
— (CLIOT)

Another related idea it seems is "scripture must be interpreted by scripture." Just as the language is open to alternate interpretation because of the small corpus, the theology may have to be re-interpreted in the light of the small body of representative literature from those days, embodied in only one main source (the Bible) among others for Hebrew origins, and by recognizing that much of the background to what survived in the texts is not now known, or perhaps is permanently lost.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Links between the Bible and ANE cultures.


Links between the Bible and ANE cultures.

My Methodologies,
Pre-suppositions and Biases. Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre,
M.A. Ed.

The article makes some powerful points. The chain of his logic leads to his conclusion that "the Hebrews have apparently transformed the Mesopotamian myths in Genesis," but the solution to the problem of why the Biblical scribes needed to produce the literature of the Bible, needs rethinking.
The author himself argues, "I now know there was No Garden or Eden, No Adam, No Eve, No Serpent, No Fall from Grace, No Noah, No Flood, No Ten Commandments written by God, NO Christ being resurrected, these are just reworked Sumerian and Mesopotamian myths for the most part." However, to explain why the religion developed in reaction to other ANE cultures by using a mythological Abraham turning from his national gods to worship Yahweh, only to be kicked out of Ur, etc., is an acceptance of mythology as historical. The author words his thoughts in a way that allows the reader to understand we are dealing with events that are in the realm of myth, but are possessed of some historical fact, but I cannot accept the point taken to the point where the stories reflect a core memory of an historical event.
That Sumerian mythological influence does not need to be explained by any particular access to the "archives" of Babylon to reflect their relationship. Especially when these ideas were "part of the furniture" as the author earlier claims.
Being Catholic by upbringing, I am familiar with the Deutero-canonical book of Judith:
Judith 5:5-9

"Then Achior, the leader of all the Ammonites, said to him, "Let my lord now hear a word from the mouth of your servant, and I will tell you the truth about this people that dwells in the nearby mountain district. No falsehood shall come from your servant's mouth. This people is descended from the Chaldeans.At one time they lived in Mesopotamia, because they would not follow the the gods of their fathers who were in Chaldea. For they had left
the ways of their ancestors, and they worshipped the God of Heaven, the God they had come to know; hence they drove them out from the presence of their gods; and they fled to Mesopotamia, and lived there a long time. Then their God commanded them to leave the place were they were living and go to the land of Canaan. There they settled, and prospered..."
This "tale" is most probably based on what was already written in the Bible. Notice though the code-word: "the God of Heaven," most likely a reference to Ahura Mazda. So, the interpretation as I see it is in agreement with the author of this site:
AskWhy!
on Essenes and the Qabalah - Christianity Revealed


It is absurd to imagine that the Persians planted these ideas only in Yehud. They were planted widely, explaining why Jews mysteriously appeared all over the parts of the east controlled by the Persians, even though they were supposed to have come from originally from a tiny underpopulated region of limestone hills in Palestine. The Persians implanted Juddin in Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the north of the Iranian plateau, as well as in the Levant. There was no diaspora but rather a spiritual convergence to the temple state deliberately set up by the Persian kings as the focus of the religion of the Juddin. After the fall of Persia, all the Juddin looked to Yehud as their spiritual home, though few wanted to go there. It was the Maccabees who gave
the Jews a national home of their own. All the Jews in the lands outside Yehud were called the diaspora, and the scriptural myth was written to support this new concept.
The give-away for me is that "their God" told them to move. Who
told the Juddin to move from a Mesopotamian land in actual history? It was none other than the first Jewish Messiah: Cyrus of Persia.

Don't forget the Collegeville Catholic Reference Library

Don't forget the Collegeville Catholic Reference Library

The Collegeville Catholic Reference Library 2.0 is reference by

Catholic Resources for Logos Bible Software.

It not only contains the NAB (New American Bible) but also:

The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship
The New Dictionary of Theology
Consecrated Phrases
Locked material on The Rule of St. Benedict, etc.

The commentary is extremely useful when synchronized in Libronix with the NAB, or indeed with any other translation you may have, but it is most useful in explaining the text-critical footnote material.