Steven Avery

And I could as well waste the forum time making the same accusation about your motives in apparent defence of a noun reading.

Not at all. First there is not one "the Hebrew text" here so your statement is very misleading. One view is that the minority reading in the Hebrew text is a more accurate preservation of the ancient text. Yet I found it fascinating that Emanuel Tov would defend even the majority reading as a verbal reading.

Afaik Spin-meister you have not indicated yet whether you believe that Tov made a good point in defending the Flint/Abegg/Ulrich verbal reading in general with the tripartite defence.

And you particularly have not indicated whether you believe Tov made a good point in approaching the Masoretic Text as a verbal reading, with his emphasis on the grammatical aspect.

It would seem that this is the first issue that you would comment on, rather than divert to secondary issues. Is Tov on solid ground ?

btw, get a spell-check

Shalom,
Steven

Steven Avery

The moderators had kaboshed this junque a while back.
Lately it is back with the boring JW vengence.
Time to rekabosh.

Honest dialog near the top.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

spin

You try hard to put tendentious readings onto other people, but you consistently fail. That's the problem when you are so committed to your conclusions. You can't jettison your errors, but I'll happily drop the noun reading if you can show me a good enough reason for doing so. You can't say the same thing about the unsupportable "pierced". But I note you won't actually mention the "pierced" reading that you want so badly.

Only misleading when you want to force something to complain about. The Hebrew text as embodied in the MT of the Leningrad is the standard from which we work.

You've got someone's opinion to cling to. Good for you!

Now, of course I could sink to your level of rhetoric, but it would only reflect as badly on me as it does against you here.

The simplest understanding of the text as far as I can see it is either 1) the ancient reader would understand the locative nature in the verse of hands and feet, translatable as "at my hands and feet", or 2) a locative has been lost. We don't have any native speakers to tell us. I don't really see any reason for Tov to have gone out on a limb on this one.

I just don't agree with him at all.

My position on the issue precludes the one you prefer. Rashi shows what the oldest Hebrew understandings were.

The parallelism of dogs and the lion is not strange. In fact, it reflects the normal modus operandi of the writers of the Hebrew bible.

Tov is a well-respected, conservative scholar, who wouldn't say anything outlandish. He goes for a verb. I can understand that, though there is no need for a verb. He merely gives you an opinion to throw against the MT, not support for the undefensible reading of "pierced", a reading apparently only chosen because of your conclusion-driven requirements. Why not try to defend your desired reading rather than sidestep the issue?


spin

spin

Why complain about such things when you are extremely prone to making similarly colored reflections? Is it only you who can make such attacks or something? Why not get on with the analysis? Why not support your desired reading?


spin

Toto

Attention: I will not bore you will the travails of being a moderator, the low pay, the onerous duties, the fate of western civilized discourse hanging on our actions ... all of which means that we can miss some "junque" or disagree on its meaning (who is that man?).

I will just remind you of The Rules: discussion of moderation issues is off topic in the thread in question. Please use the report post button.

Thank you

Toto

spin

Further on the praxeus touted letter attributed to Emanuel Tov. The letter simply accepts the reading K)RW from the Nachal Hever psalms fragment, yet even the reading itself is easily questioned and has been questioned here, given the frequent confusion between the YOD and the WAW in works of the period.

Perhaps praxeus might care to argue in favour of that WAW reading before he continues to tout the necessity of the verb for the MT K)RY in ps 22:17. (For convenience, a photo of the fragment can be found earlier in this thread.)


spin

JoeWallack

JW:
Let's take a look at the translation of Flint & Abegging the question:

The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, Page 518:

"Psalm 22 is a favorite among Christians since it is often linked in the New Testament with the suffering and death of Jesus. A well-known and controversial reading is found in verse 16, where the Masoretic Text reads, "Like a lion are my hands and feet," whereas the Septuagint has "They have pierced my hands and feet." Among the scrolls the reading in question is found only in the Psalms scroll found at Nahal Hever (abbrviated 5/6HevPs), which reads "They have pierced my hands and my feet"!


JW:
Keep in mind that old fragments like Nahal Hever generally support the Masoretic text against Christian Greek translations. F un A (Flint and Abegg) were sufficiently enthused by their own Flintulence above to Italics the whole thing and provide an exclamation remark. They have the following problems with the above:

1) The "Septuagint" does not have "They have pierced my hands and feet". "Septuagint" can either be used as a Specific term indicating a supposed official Jewish Greek translation of some/all of the Jewish Bible or it can be a general term referring to Jewish Greek translations of the Jewish Bible. Since there is no existing official Greek translation F un A must be using the general term. This is misleading since the Faithful will generally take it to mean one official translation.

The only supposed Jewish Greek translations relevant here are by Aquila and Symmachus but what is still available has been preserved (copied/translated) by Christianity. Aquila looks to have "they disfigured" and Symmachus looks to have "they sought to bind" (although you can make a case that Symmachus had "like a lion"). Thus, even if you take Aquila and Symmachus here as "the Septuagint" you still don't have "pierced" let alone any agreement on a word.

Early Christian Greek translations, Generally referred to as the "LXX", have a variety of translations also, with the most common being "they dug". I don't believe there is any early Greek translation with "pierced".


2) The 5/6HevPs fragment doesn't say "pierced". There are actually two fragments at NH (Nahal Hever) with Psalm 22:17 but everyone agrees that the offending word is illegible on one of them. Regarding "5/6HevPs", F un A's fellow Christian Bible scholars have pointed out that the only photograph F un A have provided of 5/6HevPs is not sufficiently legible to definitively identify the controversial last letter. Note that the image of 5/6HevPs in this Thread and available on the Internet has been enchanced with the actual fragment nowhere near this legible.

A closely related problem to even being able to see the physical character is that, as documented in this Thread, for this time period "Yods" and "Vavs" were written similarly, especially as a final letter.

Even if you take the final letter as "Vav" so the word is not, "like a lion", you are left with an otherwise unknown Hebrew word. Further if you assume that the "aleph", which makes the word unknown, was inserted for pronounciation purposes as opposed to spelling (even though the orthography for NH doesn't support this) you are still nowhere near the several Hebrew words for "pierced". You would have the Hebrew word "they dug" but now your translation would be, "They [wild animals] dug my hands and my feet".



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Steven Avery

Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Kimchi were appreciated.
Now I think Apikourus questioned how significant the age of rabbinics
would be for this study. It is pretty late, a millenium plus from the NT.
Maybe Phlox questioned this too.

Clearly the rabbinic commentators represent a traditional Jewish perspective and one that is at the center of modern orthodox Judaism. However we know from Isaiah 53 that sometimes there was a shift in perspective (in Isaiah 53 the shift is even noted and specifically discussed by some of the rabbinical commentators).

So we saw page after page here on things like the rabbinical commentaries.
Yet there was no mention at all about the earlier age of Jewish writings.
Zilch. Nada. Silence.

Other than the comments above that say that Rashi & friends is it, they are the early Judaism window.

So .. call it the age of Talmud and Midrash, say from Yavne or perhaps Akiba to before Saadia Gaon. Maybe about 800 years (this was also a period of Karaite response and turmoil).

So what did you find, JW and Spin and all ? Silence ?
There was no referencing of Psalm 22 ?

Or maybe it would all be irrelevant ?
(The Midrash Shuffle)

Anyway, let us know what this search for truth found.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Apikorus

In light of the renewed interest in this topic, I would commend those interested in my opinions (particularly Joe, who asked me directly) to my original post, here.

Steven Avery

btw, Api, I just caught up on this thread, having not been active here for most of it. For all of our sometimes-a-tad-irritating-disagreements on these Masoretic Text issues I found your posts and attitude quite helpful and refreshing and crisp on the thread. (Of course I disagree with the emphasis and focus when it is on some of the more fanciful corruption/emendation theories.) You have helped prevent a thread from being over-overly-politicized. Psalm 22 is an important topic that is usually handled far too superficially, even on supposed scholarship forums.

Shalom,
Steven Avery