Fri Jun 7 00:37:03 1996
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From: "Dave Washburn"
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Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 22:32:21 -7
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> I am forwarding this message from Ioudaios, written by Judith Romney
> Wegner, to the tc-list, since it deals with the newest article to appear
> in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. Perhaps some on the list
> would like to comment (especially Dave Washburn)?
>
> Jimmy Adair
I don't subscribe to Ioudaios, so this could get complicated if it
turns into a dialog, but I'll give it a shot.
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 05 Jun 96 19:10:41 EDT
> From: PWEGNER@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU
> To: First Century Judaism Discussion Forum
> Subject: Re: TC article
>
>
>
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> >2 Sam 19:2 is unusual, but
> commentators generally explain it simply as a variation from the norm, if
> they treat it at all. Others follow the lead of two MT mss, P, and T and
> repoint the second verb as a participle. However, the lack of any true
> parallel to this structure elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible raises the
> possibility of an alternative explanation: the waw-consecutive phrase is
> not part of the direct speech, but rather continues the flow of the
> narrative.<
>
> That's ingenious, but I'm not sure it would work UNLESS you are making
> Joab (rather than the king) the subject of wa-yit'abbel, thus: And Joab was
> informed, "Look, the king is weeping." So he [Joab] mourned Absalom [likewise].
I find it interesting that she inserts "so" in this translation.
There is no good reason to. The waw-consecutive need not denote any
kind of logical consequence here; it's nothing more than a basic
resumption after an aside (see the references in my article). As
such, it constitutes a syntactic break from the preceding. "Joab" is
not the subject of anything in the immediate context (her translation
with him as the subject of the passive notwithstanding), so there is
no reason to consider him the subject of this clause. David is the
one doing all the weeping and mourning, so it is natural to take this
resumption as just that: resuming the description of David's grief
over Absalom. Wegner appears to be ignoring the context in the above
comment.
> In other words, upon discovering that the king had, as it were, changed his
> stance towards Absalom (now that things had gone too far and it was too late)
> Joab deemed it prudent to appear pretty upset about what had transpired.
Hardly! Verse 6 describes how Joab ripped into David for turning a
day of victory into a day of sorrow. Once again, we're ignoring the
context by trying to make Joab the subject.
> But if you want it to mean: And Joab was informed, "Look, the king is weeping."
> And the King mourned Absalom...I don't think that would work, because taking
> the sentence as a whole, it is far more natural for wa-yit'abbel to refer back
> to Joab than to the king (if you assume that *hinneh hamelekh bokheh* is the
> only part of the sentence that is in indirect speech).
> In order to do what you want, I think the text would need to have read:
> wa-yit'abbel ha-melekh 'al Absalom.
Not at all. This kind of resumption using the waw-consecutive is
common all over the Hebrew Bible without an explicit subject. This
appears to impose an English rhetorical necessity on Hebrew, but
Hebrew doesn't need it. Context provides all the rhetorical material
needed to understand the king as the subject of wayitabel. Hebrew
grammar uses subject repetition quite sparingly, and there is no
compelling reason to see anything different here.
> Another possibility: since *bokheh*, though pointed as present participle, is
> written *Xaser* rather than *male'*, it could equally well be vocalized as
> *bakhah* -- in which case we would be back to the position that it is all
> part of the direct speech after all. "Look, the king has been weeping and
> mourning for Absalom (*bakhah wa-yit'abbel* is a quite natural construction.)
This is imaginative, but as my material has already shown, repointing
the text is unnecessary.
> I suppose *bokheh* was vocalized that way because of the preceding *hinneh*,
> but I don't think *hinneh* would absolutely require this.
I don't know why they pointed it as a participle, except perhaps that
they knew what they were doing. Hinneh may have affected the
decision, and it may not absolutely require it, but it is certainly
the more natural way to understand it.
> New JPS (I now see) translates it pretty much the way I just did, but by the
> device of using indirect speech: "Joab was told that the king WAS weeping
> and mourning over Absalom." Of course, if you rendered that back into direct
> speech you'd have "IS weeping and mourning", as you indicated.
Translating it all as indirect speech merely evades the problem.
>But it's also
> quite reasonable to amend *wa-yit'abbel* to *u-mit'abbel* even though this
> means replacing a yod with a mem, because in ancient Hebrew script, it happens
> that the yod was a much larger letter, and looked very much like the ancient
> Hebrew mem (wish I could do this on e-mail, but you can find the chart in the
> Encyclopedia Britannica article on "Alphabet").
Yod was much larger, yes, but the similarity between archaic yod and
mem ends there. Mem had three vertical strokes on a single
horizontal bar; yod had two diagonal strokes, one above the other,
attaching to a downward stroke. The downward stroke of mem slanted
to the right, the downward stroke of yod to the left. The mem's
downward stroke continued into a fairly smooth curve to the left; the
yod's downward stroke ends in a sharp hook veering off to the right.
I don't see any way that the two could be confused. There is no way
that the change between mem and yod could be a visual error; it seems
fairly obvious that it's an attempt to smooth the reading, as I
already argued.
In conclusion, these suggestions consistently overlook the context of
the clauses in question, are based on a faulty understanding of the
waw-consecutive in this verse, and appear to impose some
anachronistic grammatical and scribal ideas on the text. I see
nothing here that compels me to re-think the view I took in my
article.
>
> Judith Romney Wegner, Providence
>
>
>
>
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/home.html
"I like being second in line because I can learn from
other people's mistakes." -Naomi
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