Steven Avery

In a sense that is right. Elhanan, did not kill the well-known "Goliath", (the one that David slew), but another man of the same family name. Sometimes irony reflects truth.

And since you will not present the arguments in a rigorous way, I will go back and discuss the probabilisitic situation

The irony here is that you likely know that this seemingly impressive list of "confluence" suffers from one major problem. They are non-independent events (ironically, this is often pointed out when discussing the gazillion to one prophecy claims vis a vis Messiah).

As you point out, the name Goliath appears to be a family name, as also indicated also in the Tel-es-Safi inscription.

So having two, or more, men who are warriors, who fought David's men, with that name from the same country, the same city, in the same time period would in fact be largely a very casual synchronicity.

Gath is where and when the Goliath warrior family (various theories as to why they were giants, including genetic abnormalities, don't think they had growth hormones back then) lived, in the Philistines. And the Philistines of that time fought David and his men. Similarly if they are huge men in that family, as the Bible states, then they would be likely to use the same type of huge spear.

All this is why I asked you to be more rigorous. The Bible account is not at all unlikely, and I would contend that your scenario assumes far more, and suffers from a great sense of far-ranging conjecture, and that the various dual-scribal-error theories are similarly very strained and convoluted.

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

Apikorus

Hmmm...someone is being nonrigorous, but it ain't me. The Tel es Safi inscription does not contain galyat, but rather at most a name etymologially related to it (alwt and wlt). A degree of circumspection is required in interpreting these finds.

I've never said any such thing. My claim is simply that galyat is a proper name. There is no hint at all that this is a "family name" -- neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in the Tel es Safi inscription -- apparently you've just made that up out of whole cloth.

The arguments I've made are perfectly rigorous. I've identified multiple problems with the text and shown that a new story likely -- the famous story of David and Goliath -- likely replaced an original tale in 1 Sam 17. This in one stroke explains numerous difficulties with the texts -- difficulties which you have not begun to address.

Steven Avery

Please. I only said "indicated". If you prefer "gives support to", fine.

You were unclear. Scholars have given the view of Goliath as a family name, which is a very reasonable view of the text. How that precisely works in the naming would be an interesting question.

Jim Davila
http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/200...a_archive.html
I believe Goliath was a family name used by Jews in the first century BCE, which implies it could have been known and used any time between them and whenever the name originated ... the main reference seems to be: Rachel Hachlili, "The 'Goliath' Family in Jericho," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 235 (1979): 31-66.

Also referenced by Jim West at
http://biblical-studies.blogspot.com...s_archive.html

So if you weren't implying a family name, fine, you weren't specific. However it is a good scholarship idea.

As Theophilus said three years ago here..
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-32715.html
"The name Goliath may have been a family name and it is not unreasonable to expect that brothers or other close relatives would have similar physical characteristics."

You went off on the Greek OT stuff in response, oy vey is mir, along with the same probability argument as here.

The main "difficulty" your keep raising is the probabalisitic one, "confluence of similarities". However that is very minor, since they are non-independent events. Meanwhile, your scenario is full of conjectures with no material support whatsover, so trying to deal with them would be like trying to nail the proverbial jelly to the spear. Your welcome to play with them, irrelevant and extremely difficult as they may be.

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

Apikorus

Indeed some of the coincidences I listed were interdependent. For example, a Philistine could not come from Jericho. But one could come from Gath, Ekron, Gaza, Ashqelon, or Ashdod. The "multiple goliaths" theory remains laughably untenable.

As for this "family name" business, this is an anachronism during the Iron Age. What is the evidence for Iron Age family names? You think there was a Joe Goliath, Bob Goliath, Suzy Goliath, et al.? This "goliath family name" argument stems from a misapplication of the research of Rachel Hachlili, who in 1979 excavated the "Goliath family tomb" near Jericho. The original article, which I encourage you to read, is published in BASOR 235, 31 (1979). The find there was a monumental tomb from the Roman era containing several ossuaries from a family, several of which included the "name" Goliath (in Hebrew or Greek). Apparently, some of the men of the family were called goliath because they were exceptionally tall, as gleaned from their skeletal remains. The usage, though, of goliath is not quite what you need: "yehoezer, son of eleazar goliath," "shlomsion, mother of yehoezer goliath," etc. The adoption of the "family name" Goliath is then similar to the Coneheads of SNL fame -- it was a descriptive rather than genealogical term. It is no surprise that the name "goliath" should come to mean "giant" since the David and Goliath story was no doubt a favorite of the Israelites (so much so that it displaced the original of 1 Sam 17!). At any rate, all this is 1000 years later than the "events" described in Samuel. It doesn't help your case at all. You are also welcome to address them! I'm aware that, bound by confessional stance, you are unable to accept much of modern scholarship, whether it be on the Bible or on evolutionary biology. I leave you to your worldview. However, the position I have articulated is very much shared by the majority of biblical scholars today (evangelicals and orthodox Jews excepted), who find all this neither irrelevant nor difficult.

Incidentally, there is still more to adduce in support of my position. The fact that the LXX of 1 Sam 16-18 is so different than the MT tells us that there were different versions of the David and Goliath story in the late centuries BCE. The LXX presents a shortened version of the story (it is missing 39 of 88 verses). These differences consist of several large minuses, about two dozen small minuses, and over a dozen pluses. (The LXX seems to represent several retroverted variants throughout the text as well.) The fact that the LXX translator rendered a rather literal translation suggests that the LXX text was not an abridgement of the proto-MT, but rather a witness to a different Hebrew exemplar. This position is further supported by the Samuel scrolls from cave 4 at Qumran. (See E. Tov's article on the subject in G. Tigay, Empirical Models of Biblical Criticism. Note that this does not validate the conclusion that 1 Sam 17 is secondary, but it does demonstrate that the text was unstable in the Hebrew, which is corroborative.)

Steven Avery

You haven't even given a halfway rigorous probabilistic reason, so your tude here only is a refelction on either the paucity of your position, or your laziness. Even in your example, the fact that two Goliaths would much more likely come from the same city includes a large interdependent element.

Anyway, kudo for (finally) acknowledging the interdependence factor. (Which in fact mitigates all of your amazement). It only took about three posts for you to acknoweldge this.

That sounds like a very good argument for the biblical accounts of multiple Goliaths.

Which again would be good syncrhonicity to the Biblical account.

Actually it leads to a lot of interesting questions. Folks don't generaly take an opponents name. Not many Hitlers these days in the USA, and even Adolph went way down in usage. So perhaps Goliath has a long-term usage connected with the description of a huge warrior-type person in those ancient cultures. Which would fit the Goliaths of the Tanach very well.

Api, I have a close acquaintance, skeptic/agnostic who is a world-class mathematician. He rejects what you call "evolutionary biology" on the simple probabilistic grounds (also on the cosmological level). This is analagous to the famous Wistar seminar some years back. It is sort of dumb to try to place my rejection of certain scholarship (pseudo-scholarship in my view) as "confessional-based" when I simply consider so much of this scholarship, whether 'modern scientific textual criticism" or evolution, as simply false, broken theories of deception that belong in the waste basket.

And essentially you have my progression in reverse. The rejection of the false theories often is the catapult to lead one to a faith in the Messiah, and the purity and perfection of His Word.

And I really have little interest in the Greek OT, (other than occasionally giving some insight into the usage of a Hebrew word c 300 AD), especially on textual matters. The Masoretic Text is a Received Text and the Great Isaiah Scroll beautifully confirms that the Masoretes were not text tamperers. The DSS are all over the map otherwise, mostly supporting the Masoretic Text, sometimes not.

The Greek OT was often "smoothed" under "Christian" (often alexandrian) provenance in the third through sixth centuries In addition it is a corrupt mishegas, rarely do the texts agree. Most of the time when folks quote it they don't even realize that they are quoting one of many wildly differing Greek OT, even on their referenced verses and sections. So for me, the Greek OT has no authority at all, zilch, nada, zero. The Floyd Nolen Jones book on the web is a good starting point as to why.
http://floydjones.org/LXX.pdf

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

Apikorus

praxeus, your inability to address even the smallest number of difficulties in the text is telling. The point was that with five Philistine cities, there is still plenty of reason to view the data as coincidental. The "multiple goliaths" theory remains absurd. No, it doesn't. I showed that the lexical range of galyat in the HB is confined to a proper name. The only descriptive term which would distribute in this case is rafa, but alas this is no help to you.You're only a thousand years off, but, hey, what's a thousand years when you've got faith on your side?This sounds like something you've made up on the spot because it sounds good, but as usual I'm afraid this claim is not based on any research or critical thinking. Have you ever been to an Atlanta Braves game? Heard of the Florida State Seminoles? I could go on... Out of modesty I'll not list my own scientific credentials. Overwhelmingly scientists accept Darwinian evolution. Indeed the boards of several major scientific bodies (AAAS, NAS, NCSE, etc.) have issued statements saying as much. Your friend may well be an exception, but his area of expertise seems somewhat removed from the science in question. I enthusiastically concur that Jewish scribal tradition is remarkable in the degree to which it has preserved the Hebrew Bible. However, as 1 Sam 13:1 (which you translated wrong) and numerous other verses show, the soferim preserved a defective text -- the text they inherited. By the way, there are hundreds (thousands?) of minor differences between the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran cave 1 and the MT of Isaiah. There is little evidence of Christian tampering with the LXX. The vast majority of the differences are due to the fact that the LXX translators were working from a different Hebrew exemplar. This has been convincingly demonstrated by the advent of pre-Christian Hebrew scrolls from Qumran which are of the LXX text type, agreeing with the LXX over the Masoretic Text. (See e.g. F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran.) You've missed this point entirely, I'm afraid. As biblical text criticism and evolution are each fatal to your fundamentalist worldview, it is understandible that you should so grimly deny them both. For you, then, the "experts" are not to be found at places like Harvard, University of Chicago, Stanford, UCSD, MIT, Princeton, etc. but rather at small evangelical colleges and seminaries (like your friend Robinson). This is all quite telling, indeed.

Steven Avery

And I keep pointing out that a bit of interdependent coincidence is at most a small difficulty, and certainly far, far less than the theories of textual this-and-that based on sheer cloth.

And yet there are about five aspects of the stories that are very different.
Why? Different stories.
Meanwhile the similarities are all inter-dependent.
Much ado about very little.

Leaving aside whether a "proper name" will be shared as a descriptive name or a family name. Personally I believe you have been winging it on that, playing both ends against the middle, using vagueness as your tool . I know the verses call Goliath a name, beyond that, it seems to be only your assumptions of convenience.

You obviously didn't like the fact that the next arguments actually worked against you, so I we won't repeat them, just to say that while the time diference is a factor, archaelogy does show us a semitic family name of Goliath, and your only counterindication is the scripture reference to "name", which still allows for all three of our name concepts. Have you done a study on Philistine names ?

I just pointed out that Jews taking 'Goliath' is quite curious, without conclusion. An obvious truism. How many Jewish Goliaths do we know today ? Zero, in my experience, but lots of Davids.

Anyway, your analogy is half a point, those groups are integrated in our society, and the names are resisted, and we don't see a lot of families changing their family names to Cherokee or Seminole or Iroquois.

I'm curious whether the issue of Jewish families in Jericho with the name Goliath has been discussed.

True, folks overwhelmingly take all sorts of unnecessary drugs from the medical establishment too. There are all sorts of blindnesses, yet there is a faithful remnant and more, seeking pure truth. Those folks reject evolution, in all its interrelated elements such as cosmological, biological, and abiogenesis.

Perhaps the fundamental conceptual issue is in fact probabilistic, and the biologists are not real savvy on that, so they accept on blind faith, and other factors, indoctrination, peer pressure, status and lucre.

If you think the King James Bible is wrong on a translation you are welcome to give your "improvement" and your reason why. (Been through many of those.) Failing that, giving such a view is a waste of time and a diversion.

This is a matter of great scholarly debate. Fundamentally, I line up with Professor Schiffman and Nehemiah Gordon that the sopherim issue has been largely misunderstood by Christian David Ginsburg, Bullinger, etal. There is very little accessible and solid scholarship available, folks like Daniel Mynatt might be able to join an analysis if you know of one. There is a paper out of Hebrew University that might be nice to review. Meanwhile, your simple assertions, without details to review, mean little.

Sure, maybe tens of thousands if you include the dialect differences. However you know that there are only a handful of significant differences in the 66 chapters, that most of the translational differences have little or no effect on meaning.

General text-type with how many hundreds or thousands of differences ?

Plus you miss the point. Sure the majority of differences might have to do with starting with defective texts. However many of the very specific differences in the NT discussion can be attributed to smoothing (e.g. Cainan), while many of the most looked-at Tanach differences can be "smoothing" because of thinking the MT text was in error. In these types of cases you will tend to have variance within the Greek OT, as in Cainan. We are really talking on both a macro and a micro level, and it is good not to confuse and confound them.

Sure, since 'modern scientific TC' has postulates that assume, require and create an errant Bible text, they are overtly hostile to any Bible believing view. Evolution I consider more a joke.

Well my mathie acquaintince is Harvard and MIT, Erdos number of 1, the Wistar forum was held at MIT, so maybe there is some hope there anyway.

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

Apikorus

There are a number of coincidences between the two accounts, and this renders the "multiple goliaths" theory untenable. The clincher is the very particular description of goliath's spear. The "interdependence" is a red herring. The same name of the same Philistine hero from the same city during the same time period engaging in the same activity and with the same precise description is simply too much to regard as coincidence. Sure. They are different stories about the same character. Different stories about the death of Golliath. In one version, David kills Goliath. In the other, Elhanan kills Goliath. LOL! I have consistently maintained that galyat functions as a proper name and only a proper name in the HB. It is you who has clouded the issue by falsely suggesting otherwise. Read Hachlili's paper. She says explicitly that "goliath" is a descriptive term. You're a thousand years removed in context and your philology is all wrong. Aside from that, it's just fine.A kid in my Hebrew school, David Rosen, was abnormally large of stature. We used to call him Goliath. Next question? Indeed. In your case, you reject modern scholarship in favor of biblical fundamentalism.On the verse in question, I already explained why the KJV translation was wrong (e.g. tendentiously leaving out the "and" at the beginning of 13:2 to match its improper translation of 13:1). Incidentally, the KJV generally follows the qere rather than the kethib -- an interesting choice. We've already encountered an example where the KJV adds to the text, in 2 Sam 21:19. Perhaps we can open up a KJV problems thread. At any rate, tendentious mistranslations abound in the KJV. Here's another one: In Gen 4:10 the Hebrew reads, vayomer qayin el-hevel achiv = "And Cain said to Abel his brother." This is a defective sentence -- what Cain said is missing in the MT (but present in the LXX: "let us go to the field"). The KJV renders this as "And Cain talked with Abel his brother" in order to make it a complete sentence. But the Hebrew verb amar means "said" and not "talked/spoke". Retroverting the KJV to Hebrew would yield vayidaber qayin el-hevel achiv, but the text says vayomer (he said) and not vayidaber (he talked/spoke). I could go on with many more such examples. No, it isn't. See E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The masoretic tradition of kethib/qere itself falsifies your position. In a large number of instances (between 848 and 1566, depending on manuscript tradition), the masorah indicates that one should reject the written text and instead read a different word or set of words. Is it Arameans or Edomites in 2 Kgs 16:6? The MT kethib says the former, but the qere the latter. No, as usual it is you who misses the point. The Hebrew exemplars were not so much defective as they were different. The case of 1 Sam 16-18 shows this nicely. There are also significant differences between the LXX and MT text types of Exodus, Jeremiah, and Daniel -- all represented at Qumran, by the way. This sums up your worldview quite nicely, Steven. You start with a belief in the Bible. Any facts which challenge this view must therefore be dismissed. And evolution, which is overwhelmingly supported by scientific evidence and overwhelmingly supported by the leading scientists and scientific bodies on the planet, you dismiss as "a joke." Yes, so you say. And he's a skeptic, too? At any rate, he's the exception which proves the rule. And he's a mathematician -- a bit far afield. Perhaps one must first have a firm grasp on the underlying biochemical and biophysical processes in order to even begin to meaningfully assign a priori probabilities to various steps.And which text is the "inerrant Bible text" again?

Steven Avery

WHY do you consider it so surprising that two huge warriors from the same city would have the same type of huge spear ? And that the Hebrews would have a nice way to describe it ?

Last post you acknoweledged it.. opps

However you never defined "proper name" in a general sense or in the context of Philistine society. The term is vague, as I pointed out.

At the moment its not worth buying, there are higher priorities. If TREN has it for a couple of dollars, I'll be happy to read it.

You think that will be his tombstone ? And how do you demonstrate that the Philistines didn't have a similar usage.

Api, I have no idea of a previous discussion of this

1 Samuel 13:1
Saul reigned one year;
and when he had reigned two years over Israel,
(and?) Saul chose him three thousand men of Israel;
whereof two thousand were with Saul in Michmash and in mount Bethel,
and a thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin:
and the rest of the people he sent every man to his tent.

Lots of Hebrew vuv/ands are handled differently in translation, depending on the sentence structure and context. JPS-1985 and Rotherdam even starts a new sentence, while Young puts in an "and". So first explain the difference with and without an "and" in the English above and we can take it from there.

True, and they were well versed with the Masorahs and Masoretic Texts.

This is always the most significant textual discussion, the only one I know that combines both Masoretic and KJB elements with inerrancy questions.

You believe the text is rampant with errors, and blithely give some head-splitting scenario of blunders to reach the text today. Yet with the English "brother of" the full Masoretic text maintains perfect sense and consistency, your very weak probabilistic protestations to the contrary.

And the King James Bible translators felt that "brother of" was a contextual ellipsis and placed it there in italics. When I raised this point on b-hebrew (mentioned earlier), the one reponse, from James Read, included

"'brother of' ... there is nothing to say that this was not a normal way of speaking at the time of composition.... We quite happily talk about isreal when in fact we are talking about isreal's descendents."

One poster here has already come over to WhichVersion and had a dozen or two of these issues answered in more than full. So I do not want to duplicate efforts, and I don't want to engage in gamesmanship, the discussion should only be with an earnestness and seriousness re: the scripture text.

You must be kidding. You think there is no debate about the sopherim issues ? Are you smoking or joking ? The sopherim and kere/qetiv issues both have the sharpest disagreements among the top scholars. Nehemiah Gordon has actually researched with Tov, and is a co-author/researcher on a major Tov publication, and Nehemiah is one person who told me that Christian David Ginsburg/Bullinger ideas are, shall we say, dubious.

Here we won't get far, since you work from a presup that there is not an inerrant Word of God.

You haven't demonstrated anything in this regard.

(snip evolution fun stuff)

Or perhaps the biochemists are blinded to the fundamental probability issues for reasons such as "lack of gestalt, blind faith, indoctrination, peer pressure, status and lucre".

The King James Bible, based on the Received Texts, is the inspired and preserved Word of God, tangible and inerrant. I have always indicated this here, only the last times you put in something about "ancient manuscripts", a completely different question. We don't need 10 years of arcane language instruction to have some competence in God's Word in our hand, He has made it available to the ploughman and shopkeeper. And wow, does that simple reality, the grace of God, seem to give the pointy-heads shivers and fits.

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

Apikorus

Let's try it this way, Steven. Suppose we were to encounter a story about a reindeer named Rudolf from the North Pole who was active each Christmas and who worked with Santa Claus and about whom was written "his nose was as a bright shiny light". Who would you say we were talking about? (Note the huge interdependences! Reindeer don't come from Mexico! Santa doesn't work on Veteran's Day!) It is its usage within the Hebrew Bible that is at issue.Then I trust you'll quit spouting nonsense about archaeological finds with which you haven't the slightest familiarity.The Hebrew for "Saul reigned one year" would be ben-shanah shaul malakh. The construction ben-X shanah Y b'malkho means "Y was X years old when he began to reign" as it does everywhere else in the Tanakh. It is a common formula, occuring over two dozen times in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles (and elsewhere, e.g. Jer 52:1). The fact that you don't recognize this simply confirms your unfamiliarity with Biblical Hebrew -- you are digging an ever deeper hole for yourself here, Steven. Let's take a look at a typical application of the formula, from 1 Kings 8:26: The English translation is from the KJV (heh heh -- hoist by your own petards). Indeed you might check all the other instances of b'malkho = "when he began to reign" in the Tanakh: 2 Sam 2:10, 5:4 ; 1 Kgs 16:11, 22:42 ; 2 Kgs 8:17, 8:26, 14:2, 15:2, 15:33, 16:2, 18:2, 21:1, 21:19, 22:1, 23:31, 23:36, 24:8, 24:10. I won't bother listing all the occurrences in Chronicles. The fact is that, with one conspicuous exception, this formula is uniformly translated as I said -- even in the KJV. The only exception is the obviously corrupt 1 Sam 13:1, where the KJV suddenly departs from the standard formula and instead provides a harmonizing translation, which tendentiously eliminates the apparent corruption.That it is the only one you know is due to your own ignorance, and not due to a paucity of corruptions in the MT of the HB, or improper translations in the KJV. I've provided several other examples already. Do you have an answer to the problem of Gen 4:10? Well, I'm an equal opportunity "presupposer" in that I also presume that the Qur'an, the Bundahisn, the Emuna Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc. etc. are also not the "inerrant Word of God." This is actually funny, though unintentionally so. Oopsie! You've already admitted to a problem with 2 Sam 21:19, where the KJV adds words which are not in the Hebrew. I linked to a set of web pages which apparently demolishes various KJV myths (I have no formal opinion regarding this source). I also showed how the KJV tendentiously mistranslates 1 Sam 13:1 and Gen 4:10. There are hundreds or even thousands of examples of this sort of thing. Sure, at the level of the ploughman and the shopkeeper, you can read your KJV and be happy. The level of the scholar is something different.