you learn something new every day

These cognate languages are going to be the end of me...
Akadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic -- they are so close to Hebrew, but far
away in other respects.
The grammatical structure and vocabulary are essentially the same.
However, they all have an alphabet to be learned that
is distinct from the Regal block script of modern Hebrew. Ugaritic
and Aramaic (i.e., the Assyrian style alphabet) are do-able.
The Akkadian alphabet is not realistic to learn (with some 850 characters in it),
so you have to learn the grammar, then keep a reference tool handy for the
alphabet.
Then, within the highly similar grammar, there are distinctions and differences
(an ending here, a prefix there), and this adds to the difficulty.
Finally, there is vocabulary that is distinct between them.
But it's a shame not to learn them, since all things considered they are
basically the same language.

I GOT THIS IN MY BIBLICAL GREEK INBOX, AND I THOUGHT IT SOUNDED LIKE SOMETHING I WOULD ASK.
I JUST SO HAPPENS THAT I GOT AN ANSWER BEFORE I FOUND THE QUESTION TO ASK.
THE SABBATH IS A CRUCIAL OT TOPIC, AND SEEING HOW THE LXX TRANSLATORS TREATED IT MIGHT
BE A REVEALING STUDY (RHETORICAL AND LEXICAL):

On Nov 25, 2005, at 6:58 AM, David Mooney wrote:

> I noticed Anapausis was used in Levitcus 23 three times for sabbath
> (KJV). I was curious as to whether Anapausis was used frequently in
> the LXX for sabbath day or is it just here in Lev. 23? If anapausis
> was not used for sabbath elsewhere then what was the usual word for
> sabbath in the LXX?

There are exceptions but ANAPAUSIS is typically a *translation* of
shabbaton where as SABBAT--- is a *transliteration* of shabbat. The
two words are used together:

EX. 16:23 EIPEN DE MWUSHS PROS AUTOUS TOUTO TO hRHMA ESTIN hO
ELALHSEN KURIOS SABBATA ANAPAUSIS hAGIA TWi KURIWi AURION hOSA EAN
PESSHTE PESSETE KAI hOSA EAN hEYHTE hEYETE KAI PAN TO PLEONAZON
KATALIPETE AUTO EIS APOQHKHN EIS TO PRWI
EX. 31:15 hEX hHMERAS POIHSEIS ERGA THi DE hHMERAi THi hEBDOMHi
SABBATA ANAPAUSIS hAGIA TWi KURIWi PAS hOS POIHSEI ERGON THi hHMERAi
THi hEBDOMHi QANATWi QANATWQHSETAI
EX. 35:2 hEX hHMERAS POIHSEIS ERGA THi DE hHMERAi THi hEBDOMHi
KATAPAUSIS hAGION SABBATA ANAPAUSIS KURIWi PAS hO POIWN ERGON EN
AUTHi TELEUTATW
LE. 16:31 SABBATA SABBATWN ANAPAUSIS hAUTH ESTAI hUMIN KAI
TAPEINWSETE TAS YUCAS hUMWN NOMIMON AIWNION
LE. 23:3 hEX hHMERAS POIHSEIS ERGA KAI THi hHMERAi THi hEBDOMHi
SABBATA ANAPAUSIS KLHTH hAGIA TWi KURIWi PAN ERGON OU POIHSEIS
SABBATA ESTIN TWi KURIWi EN PASHi KATOIKIAi hUMWN
LE. 25:4 TWi DE ETEI TWi hEBDOMWi SABBATA ANAPAUSIS ESTAI THi GHi
SABBATA TWi KURIWi TON AGRON SOU OU SPEREIS KAI THN AMPELON SOU OU
TEMEIS

Note the double translation in:

LE. 16:31 SABBATA SABBATWN ANAPAUSIS for shabbat shabbaton

In some texts the LXX appears to reverse the order:

EX. 16:23 ... SABBATA ANAPAUSIS ... for shabbaton shabbat

In other places shabbaton is used alone and is rendered by ANAPAUSIS

LE. 23:24 LALHSON TOIS hUIOIS ISRAHL LEGWN TOU MHNOS TOU hEBDOMOU
MIAi TOU MHNOS ESTAI hUMIN ANAPAUSIS MNHMOSUNON SALPIGGWN KLHTH hAGIA
ESTAI hUMIN
LE. 23:39 KAI EN THi PENTEKAIDEKATHi hHMERAi TOU MHNOS TOU hEBDOMOU
TOUTOU hOTAN SUNTELESHTE TA GENHMATA THS GHS hEORTASETE TWi KURIWi
hEPTA hHMERAS THi hHMERAi THi PRWTHi ANAPAUSIS KAI THi hHMERAi THi
OGDOHi ANAPAUSIS

Perhaps you have been caught off-guard here by using the KJV, note
how the RSV renders these:

Lev. 23:24 �Say to the people of Israel, In the seventh month, on
the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a
memorial proclaimed with blast of trumpets, a holy convocation.
Lev. 23:39 � �On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you
have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall keep the feast of
the LORD seven days; on the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on
the eighth day shall be a solemn rest.




Elizabeth Kline

I learned this a year or two ago: Karl Barth was a brilliant exegete.
True, fundamentalists of the status quo stripe would paint him as one of their worst demons: "He doesn't believe the Bible is God's Word. He has heretical friends. He read Kierkegaard."
Despite the ability of men like Norman Geisler and many other to boil him down to short order heresy-soup, I find that Barth was much more than a theologian. He was a careful, respectful exegete of the same Word of God he is accused of minimizing. I found when reading his Church Dogmatics that I was breathing the same air as Calvin's "Institutes," only without all the baggage of Reformation politics. Indeed, the only politics that I can find in Barth is defiance against the false god of Nazi Germany, and his determination to serve God regardless.

Crack the "Dogmatics" open. You'll find a treasure trove of exegetical and philosophical insights. The footnotes alone are worth the reading. True, none of us will ever be able to endorse a "Barthian this" or a "Barthian that." That's beside the point. We aren't going to buy into anyone's system, not if we're careful; and we will work hard to prize the mysteries of God over the definitions of his work. I find that this is easy to do when reading Barth. His presuppositions are on his sleeve, easy to spot, which makes him the easy target that he is. "There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical." Sure, Barth is there in his writing; but he is there educating and postulating and interpreting with the fear and awe of God before him.

I remember reading in his 2nd edition Romans commentary for a paper and finding this fetching line about the transitions that occur between Romans 7 & 8: "Thanks be to God, I am not the wretched man that I am." Somewhere else he said, "Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way."Things like that. They sit right with me.

I was doing some research on Ps 110:1 in the New Testament (which is still ongoing) and I ran into something kind of strange, but pretty interesting. The theme I'm researching is Messianic hope "at the right of YHWH" as a priestly king in the line of David, which is all over the NT.

In Zech 6:13 there's a difference in the MT Hebrew and Old Greek (just saying LXX might be too general here). If you look at the Hebrew in v. 13, you see "and/then there will be a priest on his throne" ("on his throne = a'l kis'o). The Greek has kai estai ho hierus ek dexiwn (and to be the priest on his right).

I'm not sure why this substitution of right for throne happened. Most commentators give it a quick once-over. Some do grapple with the difficulties in the Hebrew grammar and conclude that the Greek was changed to make more sense of the construction for Greek readership. However, there are often exegetical reasons for differences between the Old Greek text and the Hebrew MT. I wonder if theological expectations about Messiah (a hot and developing topic following the restoration and 2nd temple period) might not have had something to do with this switch?

Hopefully when I do further research I will come accross a fully developed argument about the LXX vs. MT here. Of course, it will be in German like all the really cool journal articles. Luckily for me, I'm learning German.

I got tired of looking at the footnotes of exegetical commentaries and seeing articles (on the best topics) in other languages and not being able to even read the title of the article!

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!

Fudge.
Don't try to make a regular recipe of chocolate fudge on a humid day.
If you're not sure how humid it is, but if you stop and think, "This is a humid day," then I think it's humid enough to ruin your fudge.

Let me explain what will happen to your fudge on a humid day. You will not read this on the side of the Hershey's Cocoa Powder:
Your fudge will not harden. It will not ever be fudge, but a fudgy goo forever. You will not be able to eat it with a cup of coffee in hand, unless you a weird person who would eat fudge soup with a spoon. Instead, you will have to turn your fudge into an auxillary syrup for something else. You will have to go out to the store, spend $3.50 on Breyer's Vanilla Ice Cream, which will turn your cheap desert into a less cheap delicious desert. You will be satisfied with the delicious flavor, yes, but you will have this gnawing wish that it had turned into what it was meant to be instead of what it was not meant to be. On top of that, people may make fun of you for making delicious syrup (which you can buy in a plastic squeeze bottle) instead of delicious homemade chocolate fudge.

I found plenty of people who echoed my experience, and was curious to find out why this is. I found out that "once the candy has cooled to the point where it is no longer evaporating moisture into the air, it can actually start reabsorbing moisture from the air." I found out that relative humidity above 35% is DANGER ZONE for your fudge -- you will not get to cherish the fudge that you have in your creative imagination and industrious will.

1 Timothy 3:2 says an overseer should be "apt to teach," right? Actually, I did some hunting and found out that this word has a different sense in most ancient contexts of which we are aware.
Didaktikon may mean teachable (valuing the receiving of instruction).
I am actually leaning toward that definition in this context because:
1. The chronologically relevant extra-biblical uses of this rare term known to date all point to the sense of "teachable," which make this choice most viable on the basis of primary evidence.
2. At least some doubt should be cast on the use of "apt to teach," which is most often chosen on the grounds of context, since use of primary sources does not comply with this meaning. 3. The other argument for the use of "apt to teach" is reputedly based on etymology, but the evidence is split on this: The suffix stressing verbal force does not increase the possibility that the sense would be "apt to teach," since both possibilities connote implicit action.
4. The close cognate didaktos (subjectively, "instructed"; objectively, "communicated by teaching") with its emphasis on receiving instruction strongly suggests that the word should be translated "teachable."
5. The emphasis of the passage is on moral qualifications, not on technical giftedness, which makes the argument for "apt to teach" even less viable in my estimation.
6. In the background to this passage, the responsibility is apparently on Timothy to instruct and direct the activities of the church at Ephesus, which would work well with the overseers having a teachable spirit under the direction of apostolic authority.

Really the only places I could compare this word were in Philo's De Praemiis et Poenis 27 and De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia 35. The other reference given in BDAG is to Philodemus Rhetoric II, which I was unable to locate easily.

I'm loath to say that the Bible versions are incorrect here (so I won't!), but this is one of those spots where the evidence seems a bit shaky. At best, I could see at 2 Timothy 2:2, of learning in order to teach those who are teachable.

Well, if nothing else, try the gloss "teachable" next time you read the passage and see how it works. Not bad, eh?

GREEK
What I learned today...
The particle Ge (gamma-epsilon)
Function: to bring emphasis or prominence to a word with which it occurs.
Cognates: In Sanskrit there is a particle gha that has the same function. In Latin, qui seems to be a cognate form with the same function.
English Equivalent: None.
BGAD lists 3 function, (1) Limiting. For an example it gives Luke 11:8, "dia ge tan anaideian autou," in literal gloss translation, "because of yet/though the shamelessness of him."
(2) Intensifiying. For an example, BGAD gives Romans 8:32, "os ge tou idiou uiou ouk efeisato," in literal gloss translation, "who indeed the his own son not did spare," or cleaned up a little, "who indeed did not spare his own son." (3) Often added to other particles. Ei ge (eige), "if indeed/inasmuch as" with examples found in Ephesians 3:2 and 4:21. The ESV has the first word of Eph 3:2 "assuming" based on context, the NASB nails it literally, and the KJV disregards it and treats it as if it were only ei with no ge ("if ye have heard..."). The NKJV corrects this, by the way, by adding indeed!
Another particle combination with ge is ei de me ge, as seen in Matthew 9:17, "ei de ma ge rhegnuntai askoi," or in literal glossing, "if but not indeed/yet are being broken the bottles," or more understandably, "otherwise the bottles break." Most other combinations are pretty self-explanatory after this: kai ge, kaitoige (and yet), memounge (rather), metige (not to mention), ge toi (indeed), ofelon ge (would that indeed). Alla ge and ara ye are listed in the lexicons, but not fleshed out. Robertson's Larger Grammar argues that they add irony, argumentative climax, etc. to these otherwise commonplace conjunctions (page 1148 if you are a student who is interested).
Interesting Tidbit: Robertson's larger grammar states that the conjunction gar is actually a compounding of ge and ara.
Running a simple search, I found 26 independent occurances of ge in the NT and 134 in the LXX (Rahlf's edition of the Greek OT). I went to zhubert.com and ran a lemma search (no, I don't Biblework$ yet...), and found that his engine locates 199 occurences of the word in the OT/NT/Apocrypha. Interestingly enough, the book of Ecclesiastes far outranks all others in the quantity of uses. I think the function of these would make an interesting research project.

http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/test-archives/html4/2000-12/3361.html was an interesting discussion.

And after learning these things, I think I'm well on my way to appreciating this little particle when I come upon it in the text. If you are a koine student, hopefully you can say the same. Ge, by the way, seems to be extinct in Modern Greek as best as I can tell.

Maybe someone will be able to write back that "the salmon was indeed delicious when cooked in the dishwasher!"
(Babelfish renders the modern terms into Greek: ho solomos en malakos ge hotan hepsematos en planterio-piatwn)