spin

TedM,

You know how one normally forms an adverb in English -- simply adding an "-ly" to most adjectives. So, let's consider this sentence:

1. His head made a hard impact.

The adjective is "hard" and it qualifies the noun "impact". Let's make it an adverb:

2. His head hit the wall hardly.

Ooops, doesn't work, does it? Why? Because the word "hardly" has another meaning. Do you have any problem recognizing immediately that the sentence is wrong for our purpose? I hope not. It means something very different. This is what you need:

3. His head hit the wall hard.

Hey, but the adjective is the same as the adverb!

In ancient Hebrew a person knew what $B(YM the number meant: "seventy". It didn't mean "sevens" as surely as "hardly" is not the adverb of "hard".

They weren't big on arithmetic back then. They didn't even have a concept of zero. Consider doing arithmetic like this:

XIV +
XCVII
-----
?

Hebrew used a different system, but had analogous problems.

More seriously, the one example of arithmetic I found in Jastrow's dictionary had "seven times seven", $BY M:$BY, or more literally "seven from/of seven". Certainly not the English idiom "seven sevens"!

And it's not like they were playing poker in those days. You know, no "three nines and a pair of twos."

As much as "hardly" means both "almost none" and the adverb of "hard".

The meaning "sevens" is not available because the word formed by adding a plural ending to "seven" already has a meaning, ie "seventy".


spin

DCHindley

Casually dismiss them if you want. I will note that he starts all his pages with reader praises to himself, he still mixes biblical versions until he gets what he wants (although it is now down to NRSV and NIV and occasionally Darby), and aside from citing the sources of translations he uses, the only secondary literature I saw after quickly scanning his pages is a couple authors who write about translating Aramaic and Hebrew in Daniel. The problem is that he continues to place too much importance on prima facie impressions and then uses these as premises in other arguments using the same degree of certainty. Eventually, he has a house of cards, which he confidently presents as a fortress.

DCH

PS: To be honest, being an amateur myself and could appreciate his motivations, I kind of liked the guy (and he seemed to like me) and swapped several off-list e-mails with him about his method, which I felt were too loose. However, the melt-down was ugly and unpleasant, and his final private e-mail to me accused me of selling out to JG, and rejected advice I had given him as nothing but a suggestion to "shut up." FWIW, his posts continued to 10/15 or so, not 10/9.

Doug Shaver

Let me note first that I was in a pretty whiny mood yesterday morning.

I wouldn't say I've gotten lost in any of it, in the sense that I can't figure out what he's trying to say. It's just that he often makes the reader work so much harder to figure it out than is really necessary. The man really should find himself a competent editor.

Also, I get really put off by arguments that consist mainly of quoting huge blocks of scripture interspersed with brief unsupported assertions about the correct interpretation of the word or phrase that is in dispute.

Anyway, I had another go at it last night, and I'm working on a commentary. Whether I post the commentary here or on my Web site will depend mainly on how long it turns out to be when I'm done.

aa5874

So, how did the Egyptians manage to build the pyramids?

They were phenomenal mathematicians in antiquity and they did understand the concept of "Nothing or Zero" (no magnitude/ no quantity).

It is absolutely essential that a mathematician of antiquity understand the concept of "Nothing or Zero"(no magnitude/no quantity). Pythagoras did at around 6 century BCE.

And also you must remember that the Jews of antiquity could communicate with one another even though they did not have a concept of the modern day alphabet or vowels.

TedM

Still not sure I get it spin, but I appreciate your efforts. I just have a real hard time with the idea that they would have no way of expressing something that would have needed expression. Sorry if I've missed the answer to this here, but let's presume for the moment that they actual DID have an expression for the plural of sevens that was distinct. Can you confidently say that the Daniel passage ABSOLUTELY could not be that expression, taking into account male/female versions of the words used, other uses of the words in the same general time period, etc.??

TedM

These things require subjectivity. Thanks for your impressions. I've always had pleasant communications with him.

Thank Doug. Will be interested in your commentary. I remain impressed with the amount of work he has done and his ability to recognize many different elements to support his various interpretations of what passages are actually saying. His remains one of the best replies I've seen to Doherty's Jesus puzzle.

ted

spin

I said earlier:
That should be $B( M:$B(.

[For those interested, $ usually represented a "sh", a letter called SHIN. The ( is a consonant that doesn't exist in English; it's a sound through a closed throat called AYIN. The actual letter AYIN looks a little like a written Y, but backwards, so that's probably why the mistake when tired.]


spin

spin

How do you say "be" in Finnish? or "have" in Turkish? There's a very handy pronoun in a Filipino language that means "we" and includes the listen, while another "we" excludes the listener: how do you say that in English? For that matter, how do you distinguish between "you (singular)" and "you (plural)" in English? (Most other languages can do that.)

What you consider needs to be expressed doesn't necessarily reflect the user base of another language.

A small clarification: you'll note that I only talk of the numbers between three and nine in this issue, but look at Ex 18:21 which talks of princes of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. So the notion of plurals of numbers does in fact exist in Hebrew. The problem is how to represent them. Tens, hundreds and thousands all possess a feminine plural ending, but fifties -- well it doesn't really say "fifties" at all, but simply "fifty", which is the plural form of "five" -- "fifties" is represented by the umm singular form of "fifty" which is actually the plural form of "five". The fact that fifty is already a plural form makes it impossible to reduplicate a plural onto it. This means that if there existed a plural form of "five", it could neither be distinguished from either "fifty" or "fifties" and it's a real mess. The implied solution offered by the example of "fifties" would be to use the single form and intuit a plural from the context. This might work, given that sixty-five in Hebrew is really "sixty and five", $$YM W:XM$, one could in theory omit the W- to say that "sixty fives" might be $$YM XM$ or maybe the contrary order in Daniel.

Isn't this the equivalent of saying let's work on the assumption that the ancient Romans had Harley-Davidsons instead of chariots?

Absolutely? Why would you hope for 100%? I've already indicated it has no precedents in the numbers 3-9, because of the obvious confusion with the tens.

Now let's assume the Romans did have Harley-Davidsons: how would the Hebrews have distinguished "seventy sevens", "seventy seventies" and "seventy weeks" if the expressions looked exactly the same?


spin

TedM

I don't know the answers to your questions, but since a literal "weeks" simply doesn't work in relation to time periods in the passages, it is clear that the author meant something else. Since your analysis doesn't supply an answer, I have to conclude it is inadequate for that particular passage.

Thanks again.

ted

spin

You suddenly changed the subject from the significance of the words to interpreting the text. The easiest response to you is that the writer wasn't accurate, which is highly possible, though he was accurate for the last week, wasn't he? Oh and the first seven weeks, no?

You and your source have no way of justifying the obviously erroneous understanding proposed, then theoretically granting the notion for a moment, you are unable to say how you would get the meaning out of it.


spin