Subject: Re: TC article (fwd)

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 09:51:25 -0400 (EDT)

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
General Editor of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/TC.html <-----

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 96 19:10:41 EDT
From: [email-masked]
To: First Century Judaism Discussion Forum <[email-masked]>
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].
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.

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.

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.)

I suppose *bokheh* was vocalized that way because of the preceding *hinneh*,
but I don't think *hinneh* would absolutely require this.

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. 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").

Judith Romney Wegner, Providence

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 22:32:21 -7

> would like to comment (especially Dave Washburn)?

I don't subscribe to Ioudaios, so this could get complicated if it 
turns into a dialog, but I'll give it a shot.
 
> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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

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