Re: A Few Things Which Matt and Inabon Probably Wish Did Not Exist....

Dragonblaze wrote:
On Jul 17, 2:40 am, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
The Septuagint appears in history centuries BEFORE any version in "hebrew"
appears among an Aramaic speaking people. That is a fact.

Earliest surviving fragments of the LXX are from 2nd century BCE. The
earliest DSS Hebrew manuscripts of Biblical books are from 3rd century
BCE.
Remember, you're the one who deals only with physical evidence. Or do
you practice double standards when it comes to your arguments?

Simply I have not found any such documented assertion of this except by you. And I have asked you before but recall no answer for a reference to exactly what is of this age and the name of the document. I also repeated the evidence I can find says they were put there for unknown reasons at three distinct times between the early 1st c. BC and late 1st AD. The middle time being early 1st c. AD. As the nature of these documents vary widely and are mostly in Aramaic I also pointed out the need for any identification of a document to describe the language in which it is written. I did further note the so-called hebrew alphabet is in fact the Aramaic alphabet so an amateur conclusion from an image is not the same as being in "hebrew."

It has also been pointed out that some of them are palimpsest reuses to C14 is not conclusive.

Can you find it in yourself to address the issue this time?

Why is it necessary to be able to read Hebrew to know that is fact?

As shown, it is anything but a fact.

I await your proper citation of your claim.

Now, while I do not claim expertise in Aramaic,
that particular construct does not appear be used in Aramaic. Folmer's
The Aramaic Language in the Achaemenid Period did not have this
construct.
I accepted the Semitic constructs years ago. I have not challenged them from
the moment they were pointed out. They are not in question.

I repeat, how do you get from them to the translation of a text when it can
be as easily explained by people speaking a semitic language creating a text
in their second language Greek?

As to something not appearing in Aramaic, there is no evidence these Judeans
ever spoke anything but Aramaic. There is no evidence this late appearing
Hebrew was ever a spoken language. Those are also facts regardless of what
someone's opinion of Aramaic might be.

And I repeat, evidence has been posted. Why do you keep denying it?

You did not answer with proper citation last time. Should you have in fact found something I have overlooked I am interested.

Note this will not establish this "hebrew" was a spoken language.

Hebrew was a spoken language earlier. But you know that. I have posted
enough Hebrew ostraca from Arad and Lachish - which were found in
archaeological context.
Your assertion that Hebrew was a spoken language does not constitute evidence
that it was a spoken language. You have posted only translations which show
the people who were represented by the Lachish letters were not the good guys
described in the OT.

You're confusing the Elephantine Letters with the Lachish/Arad ones -
in spite of my clearly marking which were which. Typical sloppiness on
your part.

Whichever they are, what you posted clearly shows they were not followers of the religion we call Judaism and which ostensibly existed in the 1st c. AD although that ignores the worship of Astarte at the same time in several temples in the region including in Jerusalem.

I can find descriptions of the language used as
proto-Hebrew but not one single source nor claim of any existing evidence that
a proto-Hebrew can be distinguished from a proto-Aramaic which must also have
existed.

Read a bit on the history of the languages.

"Hebrew, the language of ancient Israel and Judah

There is no evidence it was a spoken language. No language has ever been spoken in any mythical kingdoms including the two you mention. Why do you keep inserting things which you know there is in fact contrary evidence an none in favor of existence? Can't help yourself?

and their descendant Jewish communities,
is a Northwest Semitic language.

As we know they spoke Aramaic when they first appear in history, choosing to call this "hebrew" Northwestern Semitic means Aramaic was also. You are making a distinction without a difference.

Northwest Semitic and Arabic
constitute Central Semitic,
which is a subgroup of West Semitic, one of the two primary divisions
of the Semitic branch
of the larger Afro-Asiatic family.Within Northwest Semitic, Hebrew is
classified as Canaanite
as distinct from Aramaic.

The only group known to history which could possibly be considered "caananite" are the Syria-Palestinian group identified by Herodotus. We know of them. No one else is mentioned as being in the region. As the region was ruled by Persia and all places ruled paid tribute to Persia and as Herodotus lists the three groups paying tribute to Persia in the region and none of the three are Judeans or anyone who could possibly be them there was no one in the region to speak this mythical language.

So you are going through many gyrations to demonstrate the existence of this language but if you should succeed, you will have to assign it to some group of the Palestinians because there is no evidence of any group related to the good guys of the OT. It is hardly surprising that a book of magic tales is a work of fiction.

And I am hardly alone in my observation because until the DSS discovery it was considered by even jewish scholars that Hebrew was an invented, liturgical language for the obvious facts. They spoke Aramaic when they appear in history and documents after that such as the Mishna and the Talmud are Aramaic. My position is hardly new. The only issue here is not that it was ever a spoken language but if the stories existed prior to the Septuagint.

Othermembers of the Canaanite subgroup
include the dialect of the
city-state of Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550 - 1200 BCE), and
the languages of Israel’s
immediate neighbors in the Iron Age (c. 1200–586 BCE), namely,
Phoenician and the Transjordanian
languages of Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite.

In fact what we have are so few samples of any of those supposedly different languages that they cannot be distinguished from (for example) English before it was standardized. We also know that names were parceled out by bible believers without any internal evidence for the names.

Although linguistic features found in the limited surviving evidence
for the Canaanite
dialects of the Late Bronze Age anticipate some of the distinctive
characteristics of Iron Age
Hebrew, it is unlikely that Hebrew emerged as a discrete language

It is not a matter of likely. It is a matter of physical evidence that it was ever a spoken language at all. You can look at this in several ways. For example while Latin was at one time a spoken language it survived for centuries as an academic language that no one spoke. It survives today as a language no one speaks. For several centuries after the Norman conquests the written language was not the spoken language of the islands, only of its rulers.

You are much to interested in weaving a narrative supporting the OT for which there is no evidence.

To make that clearer, without a version of the OT in "hebrew" no one would go through all of your gyrations to make a claim for the existence of this language. What you are saying would be dismissed as regional dialects of the same language. Only because of your belief stemming from a forgery do you bother to cut and paste all of this from an unidentified source.

before the end of the Late
Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Prosodic and linguistic
studies suggest that
the earliest poetry preserved in the Hebrew Bible may have been
composed before the end
of the second millennium BC,

Which, in bibleland, would mean it was an Egyptian inspiration as Egypt ruled the land at that time. If there were any evidence the locals had a civilization which was advanced enough to be literate the observation might be different.

and this poetry represents the first
identifiable phase of the
language, which is called Archaic or Archaic Biblical Hebrew (before c.
1000 BCE).
No extant inscription that can be identified specifically as Hebrew
antedates the tenth
century BCE, and Hebrew inscriptions in significant numbers do not
begin to appear before
the early eighth century BCE. Nevertheless, the Hebrew of the Iron Age
inscriptions that do
survive, especially those from Judah, is essentially the same as the
Hebrew found in the biblical
Primary History (Genesis - 2 Kings) and the original portions of the
books of the pre-Exilic prophets.

The exile is a myth. There are also no prophets only con artists. You might as well be talking about the time of middle earth for all the sense you are making.

This form of Hebrew constitutes the classical phase of the
language, which is known
as Classical or Biblical Hebrew and corresponds to the speech of the
kingdom of Judah
from its formation to the Babylonian Exile (c. tenth–sixth centuries
BC).

A time in which there is no sign of any civilization greater than dirt farmers and goatherds. You ascribe wondrous talents to illiterates.

The point being, assuming the validity of this fanciful description, it has to address the known fact there were no indigenous people nor culture to which writing could have been attributed. You really should try discussing these things in your own words some day. It would help you think things through before posting.

The Hebrew of post-Exilic Judah,

Judah first appears in history in the early 1st c. BC. There is no archaeological evidence of the existence of any biblical Judah.

You are not getting past square one.

which is represented by inscriptions of the Persian
and Hellenistic periods
and especially by the later Biblical literature (c. sixth - second
centuries BCE), is called Late
Classical or Late Biblical Hebrew. The Samaritan Pentateuch, which
seems to have
been independent of Jewish tradition by the late second century BCE,
is also an important witness to the Hebrew of this period.

The Samaritan tradition is likely the closest to the original religion of the region before some demented, savage Ayatollahs reinvented YW as a demonic savage. Compare to the original liberal Islam (A loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and Thou kind of Islam) to the burkah enforcing Wahabis. Of course they both dropped Astarte some time after the 1st AD.

Old Aramaic (950–600 BCE)
The first extant texts appear at the beginning of the first
millennium. These texts are nearly
all inscriptions on stone, usually royal inscriptions connected with
various Aramean city-states.
The corpus of texts is quite small, but minor dialect differences can
be detected, corresponding
roughly to geographic regions. So, one dialect is attested in the core
Aramean territory of Aleppo
and Damascus, another in the northwestern border region around the
Aramean city-state
of Sam'al and a third in the northeastern region around Tel Fekheriye.
There are a few
other Aramaic texts, found outside these regions, most of which attest
Aramaic dialects
mixed with features from other Semitic languages, for example, the
texts found at Deir
'Alla."
- Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia

Such a hugely fanciful creation which you had no idea of and could never have expressed only your own. BTW: A proper citation includes much more than you have chosen to give. A date and the affiliation and credentials of the author are certainly essential minimum additions. From the language it looks like he is from the Oxford college of divinity.

In any event, that you can cut and paste material you clearly cannot understand is not helping your fanciful assertions. Appeals to essentially anonymous material has even less value than an appeal to authority if a thing can be worth less than nothing.

Assertions are always fun for those who have no interest beyond believing. As there is not one single reference to any physical evidence there is no reason to assume there is any physical evidence supporting this crap.

Why must you waste so much bandwidth posting nothing of value?

The fact is there is no evidence of anything but an older form of the
language the people spoke when they first appear in history with the arrival
of Pompey in Palestine. That language is Aramaic.

The fact is you're wrong. But that is nothing unusual.

Based upon what physical evidence? Please be specific. You might as well have quoted from Jerry Falwell for all the legitimacy it has.

Surmises, surmises...
As opposed to the fabrication in a forgery. As we know the forgery is a
forgery there is technically nothing to be opposed to. Forgeries have no
standing at all.

Such as the letter of Aristeas?

That is the origin for the myth. It stood for centuries as the only basis. You do know that.

First, we do _not_ know when the LXX was translated. Or are you
leaning on the Letter of Aristeas again? Free clue: it's not genuine.
The sole claim it is translated is a forgery regardless of when. Therefore
there is no basis at all to say it is a translation.

You're wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. And you have nothing but
empty assertions to offer. No evidence whatsoever. Whatever happened
your "I deal only with physical evidence," I wonder...

I await your presentation of physical evidence. Please do so. A non-specific reference to the DSS is not physical evidence. A poorly cited recitation which contains no hint of evidence is obviously not evidence.

That is it a forgery is well known. It is not credible a person in the local government could not know who was leading the local government at the time but know who would be leading it after his death.

Please do not try to imitate me. I have been doing it much longer than you
and I know how to do it. Never pull the "as you know" line when there is a
specific statement to the contrary. It makes you look stupid.

Sarcasm is not imitation.... I'm not surprised you don't recognize it
for what it was.

I am not surprised you do not have the least idea how to express sarcasm in writing.

You raise many more questions with your preferred explanations than they
pretend to answer.
Only to those who do not bother to do _any_ study into these topics.
What study when I have you and your ilk to do all the legwork and present the
best case possible?

Your case? So you're deluded in addition to being woefully ignorant.

I await your proper citations and have no interest in essentially uncited quotations which present no evidence at all.

Again, because English is your second language, the only basis for the claim
the Septuagint is a translation, not simply when but only claim that is it a
translation is a forgery.
Why do you support a forgery?
Why not defend all forgeries?
Why are you partial to this particular forgery?

Arguing on a false premise. I have posted a fraction of the available
evidence, and it all points to a sole conclusion: we're not dealing
with a forgery.

Please post all the PHYSICAL evidence from bibleland you can find. I have been looking for it for years. I did research the DSS and did not find what you claim.

But again, none of this is going to magically conjure archaeological evidence of a civilization which could have created and preserved it. So you unless you deal with the existence of documents in light of no civilization capable of creating and preserving them you will not get any closer to your desired beliefs.

--
Jews make no bones about their desire for all Arabs to die.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4159
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
Sun Jul 19 23:55:42 EDT 2009
.

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