you learn something new every day
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Today I learned a little bit more about how complicated working in the Hebrew text is. Specifically, once you get serious about translation, you have to go beyond simply translating the text as it appears in the BHS standard text (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia presentation of the Leningrad Codex), and you begin to find all sorts of things that make you want to pull your hair out (English idiom for frustration).
Today we were working through Ruth 3 in our Hebrew Narrative roundtable study. We all had a question about verse 5, where you get to the second to the last word and find nothing but vowels hanging in thin air between the lines, no consonants to be seen anywhere. Turns out that the word is 'ly "to me," which is attested in the Qere off to the side. Now, I would be more than happy to reference the Qere every 30 seconds for Text Critical issues -- except it's written in Aramaic! Fortunately, the kind people at BHS have a nice textual apparatus, where we read that (translating loosely from Latin, which I know little of and have to use a dictionary for) "multiple Manuscripts as Qumran" and that the Septuigant reads it as'elay which nails things down pretty square.
I found this nice blurb to ease my apprehension that this anomoly was going to be happening a lot more.
Qere without Ketiv is found in ten places in the Hebrew Bible: Judges 20:13, 2 Samuel 8:3, 16:23, 18:20, 2 Kings 19:31,37, Jeremiah 31:38, 50:21, Ruth 3:5,17. Other examples of anomalous mixed forms of Ketiv and Qere include the examples of �Letters with more than one vowel� and �isolated dagesh� and the 30 cases of �Missing letters� listed by Haralambous, pp.10-11.
10 times. I can handle 10. Unfortunately, there are about 9,999 other weird things that can happen in the Hebrew Scriptures!
Today we were working through Ruth 3 in our Hebrew Narrative roundtable study. We all had a question about verse 5, where you get to the second to the last word and find nothing but vowels hanging in thin air between the lines, no consonants to be seen anywhere. Turns out that the word is 'ly "to me," which is attested in the Qere off to the side. Now, I would be more than happy to reference the Qere every 30 seconds for Text Critical issues -- except it's written in Aramaic! Fortunately, the kind people at BHS have a nice textual apparatus, where we read that (translating loosely from Latin, which I know little of and have to use a dictionary for) "multiple Manuscripts as Qumran" and that the Septuigant reads it as'elay which nails things down pretty square.
I found this nice blurb to ease my apprehension that this anomoly was going to be happening a lot more.
Qere without Ketiv is found in ten places in the Hebrew Bible: Judges 20:13, 2 Samuel 8:3, 16:23, 18:20, 2 Kings 19:31,37, Jeremiah 31:38, 50:21, Ruth 3:5,17. Other examples of anomalous mixed forms of Ketiv and Qere include the examples of �Letters with more than one vowel� and �isolated dagesh� and the 30 cases of �Missing letters� listed by Haralambous, pp.10-11.
10 times. I can handle 10. Unfortunately, there are about 9,999 other weird things that can happen in the Hebrew Scriptures!
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