Hebrew Genesis 1

[Vicomte13]

I do have to admit that I can't read Hebrew, or Greek, using the original script instead I use transliterations so I haven't been able to see the depth of the language as you have described it.

A few thoughts on that.

First, we don't have any original scripts, of course. The oldest (almost) complete Hebrew TaNaKhs are the Leningrad Codex (c. 1010) and the Aleppo Codex (c. 990). Before that it's just fragments. The oldest (almost) complete Greek Bibles are the Codex Vaticanus (c. 450) and Codex Sinaiticus (c. 450). Before that, once again, it's just fragments. And every fragment and every codex differs from every other one. Spelling differs. Words differ. Phrases differ. Nobody on earth today, no matter what his linguistic skill, CAN read the original texts, because they no longer exist.

Does the "copy of copies" matter? To the extent that one thinks that revelation depends on letter perfection, of course. It follows, though, from the fact that letter perfection is impossible to obtain from what we have, that if it really was inspired by God and God really does intend us to have these texts for our use, that whatever God intends to convey to us through these texts is conveyed without letter perfection. If letter perfection were required to know God's message, then God's message failed about 3000 years ago.

That's the first thought, and the second follows from it. Ancient Hebrew is dead. Very dead. Unlike Latin, which is said to be "dead", but which only ceased being used as a spoken institutional language in the age of the printing press, ancient Hebrew ceased to be spoken and written for any purpose other than copying Bible texts about 2400 years ago. Jesus and the Apostles and the people of Jerusalem were speaking Aramaic, not ancient Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew itself mostly died in Babylon. The writing shift didn't kill the language, but being conquered and spread among Aramaic speaking peoples wiped out most of the native speaking of the language. If one looks at the post-Roman period, through the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, one finds no Jews anywhere speaking Ancient Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is a synthetic language, purposely revised due to the scholarship of a single, known 19th/early 20th Century man. Modern Hebrew uses the Babylonian letters and some of the Biblical lexicon, but a Western verb system, and huge imports of vocabulary.

A reader and speaker of modern Hebrew can read the TaNaKh letters using modern pronunciation, and understand some of the words, but the verb is a mystery, and the idiom is a mystery.

What is more, that anything at all was preserved of ancient Hebrew is thanks to the stubborn preservation by religious Jews across the centuries. But they were themselves uprooted wanderers, with traditional texts and their own traditional ways of reading them. To Jews, the Talmud is more authoritative than the TaNaKh, because Talmud contains the legal opinions of the ancient Jewish judges, written down a generation or so after the final destruction of the Temple. There was no Mishnah in Jesus' day, because the Temple was still up and the judges were active.

What all of this means is that to "read" the ancient Hebrew texts really means to study the scholarship of people writing in other languages who have determined what the ancient words MEAN.

The very first word of the Bible - BRASYT - "b'reshiyt" or "bereshit" - does not simply mean "in the beginning". That's the sense of it that has come down. But it is more literally "in head", and it may not be part of a sentence at all. It may be a chapter heading that says "CAPITULO" that should not be read as a part of a sentence. That it HAS been read as a word that is part of a sentence is a long tradition, but there are many long traditions that may not be right.

All of the precise nuances of words that have been lost to time, or that were always ambiguous due to grammar, are generally not terrible once one is into the story of men, but when speaking of the fattening of the land and the sky and all that is in them, the things being recounted are already strange and foreign, so the reading is unsure, tenuous.

And in truth even scholars of ancient languages are reading those languages to convey messages in their native tongue.
This is why a strictly mechanical translation, one that shows each grammatical feature and that translates every occurrence of a word with precisely ONE English word, and that uses only one English word for the foreign word, is so useful.

The differences between English and the ancient Hebrew become clear. And one can see each place where a word or structure appears, because the English mimics it. Then, if one disagrees with the traditional or scholarly interpretation of the meaning of a word, one can substitute what another scholar says, and see how that changes the meaning of the text, not simply clumsily, but with the proper verb tense, gender and number.

Seeing the gender of pronouns and the number and tense of verbs is immensely useful in its own right. Doing it with a mechanical translation allows one to see in English what one has to wrestle with.

The Mechanical Translation is the best for this, for the Torah (and specifically, for the first two books of the Torah).
To see it done for the whole TaNaKh (Hebrew) and Vaticanus/Sinaiticus Greek, one has to use the Concordant Translation, published in the early 1900s. The Concordant Translation is written to be used as a Bible, so it leaves off the grammar marks and smooths things out in a way that the Mechanical Translation does not. It would be grand if the Mechanical Translation were done for the whole Hebrew TaNaKh, and then redone for the LXX/Greek New Testament, and redone again for the Vulgate.

But that doesn't exist.

Truth is, we speak and think in English (or French), and that's (those are) the language(s) that we need to use. Truth also is, the place where this really matters is in Genesis 1, if one is trying to see precisely what is revealed by the text without the filter of other people's intervening theology and cosmology (including, notably, the Jews').

The letters themselves are an aid to understanding, and literally NOBODY has done a pictographic translation.
So we're doing something a bit new here, for the purposes of honing in on what God conveyed through those letters and words, as given to the original Hebrew minds who could read them in that form, and who DID read them in that form.

Of course, once this is done, Hebrew scholars will come out of the woodwork to tear at it, because nobody studies ancient Hebrew unless he's studying theology, and nobody studies theology tabula rasa. Everybody who undertakes this sort of thing has an a priori theological position, and once one gets into the meanings of words and symbols, theology is stressed all over the place. And then people fight.

Bottom line - what we're doing here will give you a different perspective on the text, whether you read Hebrew or not.

Just the fact that there is no word in Hebrew that means "forever and ever" is itself a very important discovery.
Divine promises are made "to the horizon" - as far as you can see - but "as far as you can see" is not really the same thing as "forever". It is FUNCTIONALLY the same thing as forever to you, but there really is stuff past the horizon. We just can't see it.

Just realizing that fact means that there is no conflict when we read God promising something "forever and ever", and then later changing it. He never promised "forever and ever". He promised only "to the horizon". From the perspective of the receiver of the information it was functionally forever, but not from the perspective of those who read the same words much later.

God doesn't break his word when he makes changes. He never promised forever, only to the horizon.

 

[Vicomte13]

So, now, how are we going to proceed?

I suppose I could go back and try to pull all that has come before together. But I'm not going to because that would bore me to tears. And anything that is true stands alone as a nugget anyway, so why don't we just proceed?

We could go through the whole Hebrew alphabet letter by letter, but it seems to me more useful to proceed with those letters we need in order to read what the text presents to us. The alphabet will present itself in time.

We could start by deciding what the Bible "is", how we "should" look at it, and go off into the fever swamps of theological argument. But there's a whole site here of threads dedicated to people who want to do that. So I'm going to do something different. I'm not going to make claims about what the Scripture "is", whether it's "inspired" or not (or what "inspiration" means). I'm not going to talk about what it MEANS, I'm going to focus very doggedly on what it SAYS, just exactly what it SAYS.

Rather than trying to justify the text, I'm going to just READ the text. I'm going to read it mechanically, using mechanical translation or translation. So every time the same word appears in the Hebrew, it will appear in the English as the same word. Two English words won't be used for the same Hebrew word, and two Hebrew words won't be translated as the same English word. So, therefore, when we see a specific English word in the translation, we know that that is a representation of a single Hebrew word, with gender, number and/or tense indicated, and we know that every time we see that English word, it means that one single Hebrew word was behind it. In this way, the translation is mechanical - a machine could do it - and it is also concordant: the same word is always translated the same way, and whenever you see that English word, you know that one single Hebrew word lies behind it.

Truth: for most of the Bible, this doesn't matter, but for Genesis 1 - the Creation story - it matters greatly. And for some theological words, such as "God", "spirit", "law", "life", "breath", "wind", "be", "exist", "live", "soul", "forever", "beget" and some others, it matters a great deal. When one is seeking precise meaning, precision in translation is important.

I will go further and state that I think precision in translation supersedes importance of tradition. If, for example, Christians have a long tradition of treating certain words certain ways, to my eyes that is not an argument for translating a word differently. Rather, I think the text should be translated exactly as written, and let the chips fall as they may: the meaning conveyed by the actual words is more persuasive, to me, than the meaning conveyed by 2000, or 3500, years of Christian or Jewish error.

This COULD kick up a storm of argument over the authority of tradition, but I will not be engaging in that argument here. For the purposes of mechanical translation, tradition has precisely zero authority. The debates over manuscripts have zero authority. One single manuscript, the Codex Leningradensis, is the base text. Every manuscript differs from every other one, and some of those differences are substantive, but I'm not going to present them here. What I do here is based exclusively on the text of the Leningrad Codex, unmodified by any other source. If somebody wants to present an alternative manuscript, that's fine - we'll treat that the same way and see the difference. The meta of "WHY" the difference is not going to be something I'll be debating (to me, there's nothing to debate: handwritten copies, always differ from each other in ways that printed documents don't). If different meanings are conveyed by different manuscript variants, we can discuss them - but I'll never be introducing the variants, because I don't really care. My conclusion is that the Leningrad Codex is good enough to get what God meant to say, so going into ten thousand variants is searching for gold in low-yield ore. There may be some gold there, but not much, and not worth investing any more of my time. You are, of course, invited to invest your time in it, and post your findings here.

When we delve into the letters as pictographs, that they ARE the pictographic letters is established by archaeology. That they represented a certain sound is demonstrated by the fact that the word that is depicted in the picture starts with that sound. That the picture is of the thing that the word-name of the letter names is usually clear. Sometimes it requires some imagination to see it.

That the thing named and depicted in the picture has value for helping to define the word that the pictures are used to draw might be controversial for you. To me it is self-evident. That the sounds that make up the word that names the letter can themselves be spelled out in pictures to get further meaning might be more controversial. I do it because it is so effective at disclosing the depth of God's inspiration. That the string of pictographs that form a word of text is itself a readable SENTENCE that conveys its own, parallel meaning is probably the most controversial thing of all. It is also the most interesting part of the work, and conveys the depth of God's communication and inspiration.

It also conveys God's foresight - that words developed long before writing could themselves convey important meaning when the pictographs to which those words are reduced would evince divine design of language itself. That the pictographs are universals which seem to "work" across language lines evinces more of the same.

So the place we'll start (or start over, given earlier stuff on this thread) is with the first pictographic sentence of Scripture, which is the first word: "bereshiyt" or "BRASYT".

 

[mark kennedy]

Puzzling but the original root seems to indicate 'to cut', which is consistent the general theme of separating light from darkness. land from sea...etc. I found this:

The verb occurs in the basic verbal stem (qal) and its passive stem (niphal). There are a few cases where the word seems to occur in a different stem (piel) with the meaning “to cut down” (e.g., a forest [Josh. 17:15]), or “cut out” (Ezek. 21:24). There is insufficient data to determine how this idea could be related to the verb “to create.” It is possible that “cutting” was a way of “creating.” But it is more likely that we are dealing with separate words entirely, even though the older dictionaries list these meanings under the one root. Holladay lists these as separate roots.​

There is another verb bara’ which the dictionaries list as a separate root, “to be fat.” It occurs in the causative stem (hiphil) with the meaning “to fatten” (1 Sam. 2:29). This would mean then that there were three separate words spelled bara’ (as Holladay lists in his dictionary).(Bara, Create)​

Things created by God: the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1; Isa. 40:26; 42:5; 45:18; 65:17); man (Gen. 1:27; 5:2; 6:7; Deut. 4:32; Ps. 89:47; Isa. 43:7; 45:12); Israel (Isa. 43:1; Mal. 2:10); a new thing (Jer. 31:22); cloud and smoke (Isa. 4:5); north and south (Ps. 89:12); salvation and righteousness (Isa. 45:8); speech (Isa. 57:19); darkness (Isa. 45:7); wind (Amos 4:13); and a new heart (Ps. 51:10).'

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[mark kennedy]

A few thoughts on that.

First, we don't have any original scripts, of course. The oldest (almost) complete Hebrew TaNaKhs are the Leningrad Codex (c. 1010) and the Aleppo Codex (c. 990). Before that it's just fragments. The oldest (almost) complete Greek Bibles are the Codex Vaticanus (c. 450) and Codex Sinaiticus (c. 450). Before that, once again, it's just fragments. And every fragment and every codex differs from every other one. Spelling differs. Words differ. Phrases differ. Nobody on earth today, no matter what his linguistic skill, CAN read the original texts, because they no longer exist.

Let's bear in mind the oldest version of the Masoretic Text only went back to the tenth century, until the dead sea scrolls were discovered. Rumors swirled like leaves in the fall wind, what they found when they compared the tenth century version with the second century BC version was normal text variation. We do have the original text, the Old Testament is much older so it has accumulated a number of textual changes, none of them effecting any of the history or doctrine. The New Testament, it should be understood, was preserved exactly the same way the Hebrew Scriptures were. John Mark, the author of the Gospel according to Mark, the first book of the New Testament canon, was a Levite.

We don't need the autographs, there are some 30,000 extant manuscripts that do not differ from one another in any dramatic way. We don't need the actual parchments, we have the best preserved documents from antiquity.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[Vicomte13]

Let's bear in mind the oldest version of the Masoretic Text only went back to the tenth century, until the dead sea scrolls were discovered. Rumors swirled like leaves in the fall wind, what they found when they compared the tenth century version with the second century BC version was normal text variation. We do have the original text, the Old Testament is much older so it has accumulated a number of textual changes, none of them effecting any of the history or doctrine. The New Testament, it should be understood, was preserved exactly the same way the Hebrew Scriptures were. John Mark, the author of the Gospel according to Mark, the first book of the New Testament canon, was a Levite.

We don't need the autographs, there are some 30,000 extant manuscripts that do not differ from one another in any dramatic way. We don't need the actual parchments, we have the best preserved documents from antiquity.

Grace and peace,
Mark

The Dead Sea Scrolls are not the Massoretic Text. They lack vowel pointing. Also, they are only fragments. Putting all of the fragments together, one can get a piece or a portion of each book of the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament, excepting Esther, but one can only put together about 25% of the Biblical text.

And of course every manuscript differs from every other one.

The question of whether a difference is "dramatic" or not is very subjective. Is there a difference between "young woman", "maiden" or "virgin"? Perhaps, perhaps not. It really depends on how one looks at it.

I agree with you that we have very good attestation of these texts, in Greek, Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew; also Ge'ez. The differences between them are interesting. Whether they rise to the level of theology or not is a matter of taste. There are "KJV-Onlyists" who are adamant that the only TRUE base on which to translate the New Testament is the "textus receptus" upon which the KJV was translated. I am not nearly so rigid, because I think that the lack of any precise text, and differences between all of them is proof positive that letter-perfection was not at all necessary for God to convey whatever it is that he wanted to convey by Scripture.

I recognize, however, that there are people who theologically do not agree, and when faced with their objections, I have to raise the point that every single ancient manuscript differs from every single other one. No two texts are identical. That proves rather decisively that letter-perfection really cannot be the standard, lest the Bible then have to be set aside for want of reliability. I agree with you that the transmission has been pretty good, but it has not been perfect.

To me, this means that perfect transmission was obviously not necessary for God to get across what he was trying to get across when he inspired the texts, because he didn't protect their perfect replication. Imperfect but close was good enough for God, and therefore it has to be good enough for us theologically. The opposing viewpoint is untenable on the facts.

So when we say "none of the changes affect history or doctrine", that may or may not be true, depending on the theology of the reader.

For my part, I like to see the variants to make up my own mind as to whether they matter or not. The Alexandrian text type for the New Testament is sparer in some language than the Byzantine text, and those differences have certainly spawned disputes with people in my own experience. They spawned theological disputes as well, which is why various Churches, such as the Greek Orthodox, for example, or the Reformation-Era translators, insisted on this manuscript or version or that as being "authoritative"...because it agreed most with their theology.

As far as John Mark being the author of the Gospel attributed to Mark, if we take away the Church traditions of the origins of the documents, the documents themselves don't tell us that Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, or for the most part Peter, James, Paul or Jude were the authors of the documents ascribed to them. The Apocalypsos tells us that it's author's name was John, but doesn't tell us who John was. Tradition fills all of this in. Of course that same tradition comes part and parcel with transubstantiation, the longer Catholic and Orthodox canons, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the dormition and assumption of Mary, and all of the other thick and ancient traditions of the Church. Obviously I tolerate these traditions (whether I believe each one literally is a personal matter), but just as obviously, the tradition that John Mark was the author of "Mark's" Gospel is one of those traditions in the pool along with perpetual virginity. I can't see a basis for deciding one tradition is true and another is not other than simple preference.

So when I do what I am doing with Genesis here, I simply refuse to step outside of the text for anything but a lexicon by which to read the words. The traditions attached TO the text are really as large as the text itself in people's religious beliefs, but I am aiming at just understanding exactly what the texts SAY, precisely, and for this purpose I am uninterested in having tradition tell me what the text MEANS, or is supposed to mean, or who wrote it if it doesn't tell me itself (and it almost never does). Does it make a difference to the text whether or not we say that it was written by Mark? Only if we build a theology from facts external to the texts themselves.

Now, of course we do that, all of us. Even the most hard-bitten Sola Scripturalist has to have a tradition to tell him what set of writings IS Scripture so that he can be "sola" regarding it.

All of those "meta-" and "trans-" factors go into making a tradition, and ultimately a religion, but here I am working well, WELL below that level. Here, I'm just assuming without comment or discussion that the text of Genesis 1 is worth reading and parsing, and then parsing it, right down to the letters, in order to try to determine what it literally (and mechanically) SAYS, quite apart from what conflicting traditions say it MEANS.

One of the things I've seen over the years as a lawyer growing in experience, is that young lawyers (like I once was), when confronted with a long and difficult contract, are eager to say what it means. I recall an old and very experienced lawyer in a huge litigation over breach of contract repeatedly stopping his eager young associate and asking him to pull up the contract and read out loud some passage or other. He would listen to the associate for a bit, and then hear the associate theorize on it, but then he would stop him and say "Don't tell me what it MEANS, tell me what it SAYS".

I've seen over time the wisdom in that approach. In a lawsuit over contract, both sides rush into court convinced they are right, and eager to tell the judge what the contract MEANS, and that surely the judge must give judgment to their side. But in every case the judge is going to ignore them both until HE has read the document himself, HE has reasoned out what it means to HIM, and where the conflict lies. And then he will ask questions that are aimed at resolving HIS questions and doubts. What the two sides believe it means are of little to no consequence - what the JUDGE thinks it means is what controls the outcome, and the judge will invariably start with what the actual language SAYS, read plainly and disinterestedly. Often, cases are really not that hard, because read plainly for what they SAY, most contracts give the answer to the dispute right on the face of the document. Usually, it's that people don't want to DO something they've contracted to do, for various reasons, and seek to evade or nullify what the contract says.

The same thing is true with religious texts.

But that's not what I'm doing here. Here, I am looking directly at the text, stripping away all traditions that tell me what it MEANS, and looking only at what it SAYS, unadorned with traditional "helps" that seek to steer the reader in the direction of the opinion of the writer's tradition.

This is going long, so here's an example of what that means. You've provided a source that says that there are several words "Bara" with different meanings. But this itself is tradition. If one goes to Dead Sea Scroll era Hebrew, there are no vowel points. Some of the letters that later were treated as consonants are actually vowels in the older Hebrew, but besides that, there are no vowel points in the ancient text at all. So when a set of Hebrew consonants is said, with the vowel pointing, to mean different things, that is a tradition that comes from the Massoretes, whose vowel pointing preserves the non-standard Galilean pronunciation of Hebrew - already a dead language - circa 1000 AD. With vowel pointing, one can tease different words from the text. But there were no vowel points for 2000 years.

Therefore, anything derived from the vowel pointing, different "nuances" are nuances that derive from a tradition, but that are not actually IN the text. The text is consonants, not vowel points.

That causes the words to telescope into one word. Now, maybe some of the traditions are right and one set of consonants was used for different words. But we have no way at all of knowing that. It's derived from much later tradition.

This is why approaching the text mechanically, so that "BRA" is always translated by one word, while it runs the risk of oversimplifying, has the virtue of presenting what the text SAYS. That it MIGHT mean different things in different places is certainly possible, but what those different things are cannot be known from the text itself. Tradition supplies.

And if we're going to go with tradition, I can see no reason to accept some arcane guess about different words from the same Hebrew word, but then reject perpetual virginity, trans-substantiation, or the inclusion of the Books of Maccabbees in the Canon, or Enoch for that matter.

The presence or absence of Enoch certainly changes utterly one's understanding of the story of man's history, and certainly Jude praised the book, Peter referred to it, and Jesus cited it directly or obliquely many times.

So, ARE there really three or four meanings to an ancient Hebrew consonant set? Tradition associated with vowel points added 3000 years later say yes. But Jesus quoted the Book of Enoch, so is that Scripture? On what grounds does one accept on tradition and reject the other?

I will be treating each word as a single word, and ignoring later vowel pointing because they are glosses on Scripture, the equivalent of footnotes. The Scripture itself is just the ancient Hebrew pictographs without vowel pointing.

We don't have to resolve the issue of Enoch, because we're just using Genesis 1.

Does BRA mean "cut", with the image of God as a sort of woodcutter, cutting animals and man out of the stuff of the earth and working with fine tools on the details?

Or does it mean "fatten", to make substantial, as a shepherd watches his sheep grow and fatten and the pastures fill up during the seasons.

I will use fatten consistently. If one wishes to use cut, that's fine, just substitute "cut" for "fatten".

I've gone long again. Sorry.

 

[mark kennedy]

The Dead Sea Scrolls are not the Massoretic Text. They lack vowel pointing. Also, they are only fragments. Putting all of the fragments together, one can get a piece or a portion of each book of the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament, excepting Esther, but one can only put together about 25% of the Biblical text.

That's not what I said, I said the Massoretic Text only went back to the 10th century and was confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. My point was that normal text variation was the only real difference.

And of course every manuscript differs from every other one.

The question of whether a difference is "dramatic" or not is very subjective. Is there a difference between "young woman", "maiden" or "virgin"? Perhaps, perhaps not. It really depends on how one looks at it.

Of course.

I agree with you that we have very good attestation of these texts, in Greek, Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew; also Ge'ez. The differences between them are interesting. Whether they rise to the level of theology or not is a matter of taste. There are "KJV-Onlyists" who are adamant that the only TRUE base on which to translate the New Testament is the "textus receptus" upon which the KJV was translated. I am not nearly so rigid, because I think that the lack of any precise text, and differences between all of them is proof positive that letter-perfection was not at all necessary for God to convey whatever it is that he wanted to convey by Scripture.

I've heard that many times before, in fact some would make the argument that the marks of human handling strengthen the credibility of the text. Texus receptus does have some issues, it's less legible then the Byzantine text and known for having more text variation since it's given to more errors. Nevertheless, the text between the manuscripts really do not diverge that much, some notable issues not withstanding.

I recognize, however, that there are people who theologically do not agree, and when faced with their objections, I have to raise the point that every single ancient manuscript differs from every single other one. No two texts are identical. That proves rather decisively that letter-perfection really cannot be the standard, lest the Bible then have to be set aside for want of reliability. I agree with you that the transmission has been pretty good, but it has not been perfect.

Couldn't agree more.

To me, this means that perfect transmission was obviously not necessary for God to get across what he was trying to get across when he inspired the texts, because he didn't protect their perfect replication. Imperfect but close was good enough for God, and therefore it has to be good enough for us theologically. The opposing viewpoint is untenable on the facts.

So when we say "none of the changes affect history or doctrine", that may or may not be true, depending on the theology of the reader.

I've found it to be true, I suppose we must all come to our own conclusions.

For my part, I like to see the variants to make up my own mind as to whether they matter or not. The Alexandrian text type for the New Testament is sparer in some language than the Byzantine text, and those differences have certainly spawned disputes with people in my own experience. They spawned theological disputes as well, which is why various Churches, such as the Greek Orthodox, for example, or the Reformation-Era translators, insisted on this manuscript or version or that as being "authoritative"...because it agreed most with their theology.

Interesting...

As far as John Mark being the author of the Gospel attributed to Mark, if we take away the Church traditions of the origins of the documents, the documents themselves don't tell us that Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, or for the most part Peter, James, Paul or Jude were the authors of the documents ascribed to them. The Apocalypsos tells us that it's author's name was John, but doesn't tell us who John was. Tradition fills all of this in. Of course that same tradition comes part and parcel with transubstantiation, the longer Catholic and Orthodox canons, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the dormition and assumption of Mary, and all of the other thick and ancient traditions of the Church. Obviously I tolerate these traditions (whether I believe each one literally is a personal matter), but just as obviously, the tradition that John Mark was the author of "Mark's" Gospel is one of those traditions in the pool along with perpetual virginity. I can't see a basis for deciding one tradition is true and another is not other than simple preference.

I have no idea where the 'perpetual virginity' of Mary comes into this but John Mark wrote the Gospel according to Mark and it's puzzling how you are skeptical, not that I'm trying to persuade you otherwise. The Apostle John wrote the Revelation as far as I can tell and alternative authors belong to a line of speculation I find untenable. Of course, I realize there are different opinions on the matter which is perfectly expected and welcomed, at least to me.

So when I do what I am doing with Genesis here, I simply refuse to step outside of the text for anything but a lexicon by which to read the words. The traditions attached TO the text are really as large as the text itself in people's religious beliefs, but I am aiming at just understanding exactly what the texts SAY, precisely, and for this purpose I am uninterested in having tradition tell me what the text MEANS, or is supposed to mean, or who wrote it if it doesn't tell me itself (and it almost never does). Does it make a difference to the text whether or not we say that it was written by Mark? Only if we build a theology from facts external to the texts themselves.

I think you may have missed my point, I was pointing out the John Mark was a Levite. The reason I found that important is because the New Testament was preserved, very much, as the Hebrew Scriptures were. As far as the authorship of Genesis, authorship is attributed to Moses but the overall penning of the text was Levitical. Moses never penned the words that 'Moses died', that does not discount the authority of the text. Bear in mind Moses was from the tribe of Levi and nothing in the Pentateuch suggests Moses was the sole author, just the lead scribe and prophetic authority.

Does text variation effect our theology significantly? I've never seen anything to suggest I should rethink my theology. As a matter of fact I find text variation to be an interesting but minor scholarly issue, little more.

Now, of course we do that, all of us. Even the most hard-bitten Sola Scripturalist has to have a tradition to tell him what set of writings IS Scripture so that he can be "sola" regarding it.

True enough.

All of those "meta-" and "trans-" factors go into making a tradition, and ultimately a religion, but here I am working well, WELL below that level. Here, I'm just assuming without comment or discussion that the text of Genesis 1 is worth reading and parsing, and then parsing it, right down to the letters, in order to try to determine what it literally (and mechanically) SAYS, quite apart from what conflicting traditions say it MEANS.

You have my attention...

One of the things I've seen over the years as a lawyer growing in experience, is that young lawyers (like I once was), when confronted with a long and difficult contract, are eager to say what it means. I recall an old and very experienced lawyer in a huge litigation over breach of contract repeatedly stopping his eager young associate and asking him to pull up the contract and read out loud some passage or other. He would listen to the associate for a bit, and then hear the associate theorize on it, but then he would stop him and say "Don't tell me what it MEANS, tell me what it SAYS".

Yes...let's bear in mind that the Mosaic Law was an oral law recorded in scrolls.

I've seen over time the wisdom in that approach. In a lawsuit over contract, both sides rush into court convinced they are right, and eager to tell the judge what the contract MEANS, and that surely the judge must give judgment to their side. But in every case the judge is going to ignore them both until HE has read the document himself, HE has reasoned out what it means to HIM, and where the conflict lies. And then he will ask questions that are aimed at resolving HIS questions and doubts. What the two sides believe it means are of little to no consequence - what the JUDGE thinks it means is what controls the outcome, and the judge will invariably start with what the actual language SAYS, read plainly and disinterestedly. Often, cases are really not that hard, because read plainly for what they SAY, most contracts give the answer to the dispute right on the face of the document. Usually, it's that people don't want to DO something they've contracted to do, for various reasons, and seek to evade or nullify what the contract says.

The same thing is true with religious texts.

Sounds reasonable.

But that's not what I'm doing here. Here, I am looking directly at the text, stripping away all traditions that tell me what it MEANS, and looking only at what it SAYS, unadorned with traditional "helps" that seek to steer the reader in the direction of the opinion of the writer's tradition.

Right. Getting on to what it actually says...

This is going long, so here's an example of what that means. You've provided a source that says that there are several words "Bara" with different meanings. But this itself is tradition. If one goes to Dead Sea Scroll era Hebrew, there are no vowel points. Some of the letters that later were treated as consonants are actually vowels in the older Hebrew, but besides that, there are no vowel points in the ancient text at all. So when a set of Hebrew consonants is said, with the vowel pointing, to mean different things, that is a tradition that comes from the Massoretes, whose vowel pointing preserves the non-standard Galilean pronunciation of Hebrew - already a dead language - circa 1000 AD. With vowel pointing, one can tease different words from the text. But there were no vowel points for 2000 years.

Someone suggested that bara meant 'fatten', I was pointing out that it was similar to other words. The form used in Genesis 1 is hardly ambiguise, it is definitively used to describe a supreme act of God specifically in the creation of the universe, life and man. Later uses of this word are applied, mostly in Isaiah, to the creation of Israel. This has profound theological significance for the creation of the Church, the Incarnation and new birth. That was my primary point and the semantics while all very interesting are more of a sideline issue. What the word means is not really that questionable from where I'm sitting.

Therefore, anything derived from the vowel pointing, different "nuances" are nuances that derive from a tradition, but that are not actually IN the text. The text is consonants, not vowel points.

Strangely, not of any great significance to me but still an interesting semantic point of interest.

That causes the words to telescope into one word. Now, maybe some of the traditions are right and one set of consonants was used for different words. But we have no way at all of knowing that. It's derived from much later tradition.

This is why approaching the text mechanically, so that "BRA" is always translated by one word, while it runs the risk of oversimplifying, has the virtue of presenting what the text SAYS. That it MIGHT mean different things in different places is certainly possible, but what those different things are cannot be known from the text itself. Tradition supplies.

The lack of vowels is a natural part of the Hebrew, really not seeing the main point here.

And if we're going to go with tradition, I can see no reason to accept some arcane guess about different words from the same Hebrew word, but then reject perpetual virginity, trans-substantiation, or the inclusion of the Books of Maccabbees in the Canon, or Enoch for that matter.

Now I'm really puzzled, how did we make a leap from the oldest of the OT text to doctrines that were hammered out after the first millennium AD. None of those doctrines are based on semantics, they emerged from disputes regarding ecclesiastical authority, reflecting issues contemporary to those times.

The presence or absence of Enoch certainly changes utterly one's understanding of the story of man's history, and certainly Jude praised the book, Peter referred to it, and Jesus cited it directly or obliquely many times.

The book of Enoch remains obscure apart from a handful of New Testament quotes.

So, ARE there really three or four meanings to an ancient Hebrew consonant set? Tradition associated with vowel points added 3000 years later say yes. But Jesus quoted the Book of Enoch, so is that Scripture? On what grounds does one accept on tradition and reject the other?

When Jesus quotes it, it's Scripture. Bear in mind Jesus was the only one who really talked about hell and that without hardly any OT authority.

I will be treating each word as a single word, and ignoring later vowel pointing because they are glosses on Scripture, the equivalent of footnotes. The Scripture itself is just the ancient Hebrew pictographs without vowel pointing.

A common semantic point of interest, especially with regards to the I AM THAT I AM. I'll be interested in where you go with this, it's often substantive when you get down to the details.

We don't have to resolve the issue of Enoch, because we're just using Genesis 1.

Perhaps...

Does BRA mean "cut", with the image of God as a sort of woodcutter, cutting animals and man out of the stuff of the earth and working with fine tools on the details?

The root does, that is all I really know for sure.

Or does it mean "fatten", to make substantial, as a shepherd watches his sheep grow and fatten and the pastures fill up during the seasons.

I will use fatten consistently. If one wishes to use cut, that's fine, just substitute "cut" for "fatten".

I've gone long again. Sorry.

There may be something to be gained from going long, I enjoyed that post very much. Let's not jump to conclusions, it's far more interesting to pursue the intended meaning of this very ancient text and seeing where the semantics and scholarship involved might take us.

Thanks for that, it's always encouraging to see someone take the intricacies of these ancient texts seriously.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[Hoghead1]

Broaden your horizons. There are some out there. I am studying under two such scholars.

The usual line of reasoning is that the roots of the LXX text are more reliable than those of the Masoretic Jewish text, which may have been doctored to cast a negative light on Christianity. The LXX text dates to a time before the rise of Christianity and is therefore more reliable as a representation of the ancient text. In the Christian East, the LXX text was the Bible. Another point that I have heard offered is that Koine Greek, having a significantly larger lexicon than Hebrew, is a more expressive and, therefore, superior language for communicating about God. Before Jerome revised the Latin text with reference to the available Hebrew sources, no one really worried about the Hebrew text.

I sorry, but that line of reasoning makes absolutely no sense to me. Specifically what sources are pushing these ideas?

 

[Vicomte13]

Mark,

Thank you for the long and thoughtful response to my post. Here, I'm going to further filet out some of the subjects that, to me, have loose ends. Then I'll be able to move on to some features of the alphabet.

Texus receptus does have some issues, it's less legible then the Byzantine text and known for having more text variation since it's given to more errors. Nevertheless, the text between the manuscripts really do not diverge that much, some notable issues not withstanding.

I would say that, in truth, the Textus Receptus (of Erasmian and KJV fame) really IS a Byzantine-type text, a particular manuscript of that tradition. Today with air and steamship and train and car travel, and the Internet, stuff really gets around. In 1500, things took forever to get around, so having A text from the Greek East, was a grand thing - a thing copied and recopied and printed, such that the manuscript that happened to have made its way West became a "thing" in its own right. Had a different Byzantine-type manuscript made its way West, THAT would have been "the" Textus Receptus, etc. I'm not really arguing, so much as signaling that, to my mind, the differences between the TR and the Patriarchal Text of the Greek Orthodox is really nothing other than slightly different manuscripts of the same Byzantine Tradition. Had, instead, somebody dusted off the Codex Vaticanus in 1500 and used THAT as the "textus receptus", well, then Katie bar the door! I suppose in a way that's what the Jehovah's Witnesses have done - taken the Alexandrian Text Type, focused on the differences, the things missing in those manuscripts, and given great theological weight to those differences, elevating those differences to being THE theological "corruption" (in the Byzantine/Textus Receptus/Vulgate traditions) that caused the Church to err. Flipped around the other way, the spare nature of the Alexandrine texts, elevated to the pinnacle of theological importance, might be said (by those of the Western and Greek Orthodox traditions) to be what rendered the Oriental Orthodox "monophysite" (in the old understanding), and the Jehovah's Witnesses neo-Arian heretics.

For my part, I'm just playing with those thoughts - don't really care. Just wanted to put TR in the tradition stream of Byzantium, where I think it belongs.

I have no idea where the 'perpetual virginity' of Mary comes into this but John Mark wrote the Gospel according to Mark and it's puzzling how you are skeptical, not that I'm trying to persuade you otherwise.

Let me explain - and believe me when I say I am not trying to be controversial, just calling it as I see it. From reading the Gospel "according to Mark", and the rest of the Bible, there's nothing in all of it - even the most extended of all of the canons (the Ethiopian Orthodox) that tells me that John Mark wrote that Gospel. The book it utterly silent on the matter. If we were to be the most hard-bitten "Scripture onlyists", we would have to truthfully say that we have absolutely no idea from Scripture who wrote the Gospel "according to Mark". That we can say "It was written by John Mark" is due to correspondence of second and third century men of the church, in which they stated it. The various letters and fragments we have them them, traced back, really have one guy somewhere in the 200s, a century and more after the events, saying that John Mark wrote it, and nobody seeming to argue about it within the few letters we have.

Now, Marcan authorship is significant, for Mark is said to be Peter's interpreter. Thus, it is assumed that Mark got the details about Jesus' like from none other than the head of the Apostles - giving his Gospel a certain authority by simple virtue of who gave the stories of what happened. Moreover, if modern textual critics are to be believed, "Luke" and "Matthew" (same issue regarding authorship) may have copied portions of their Gospels from Mark. If that is so, then Mark's Gospel is the origin of two more Gospels, and the story told originated with the designated leader of the Church, Peter. That could make Mark's Gospel particularly authoritative, if it was written by John Mark at all.

But how do I know it is written by him, or by anybody associated with any Apostle? IT doesn't pretend to be. Some Second Century writer said so, others agreed, and this seems to reflect the general belief of the Christians who won out in the struggles for the early direction of the Church. I'm inclined to accept Marcan authorship on the basis of this tradition, but I am fully aware as I do so that in doing so I am placing faith in the verity of letters that are not Scripture, written by men who do not appear in Scripture, as well on the "general consensus" of the faceless mass of the ancient Church. I'm TRUSTING the Church to have gotten that detail right, and to have rightly selected the Gospel of Mark as Scripture.

And this is where the issue of the perpetual virginity of Mary comes in: the guy who wrote that letter in whom I am placing faith that he got it right, and the Church in whom I am placing faith that they got the book selection right, both ALSO believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary - a doctrinal belief that is of little practical interest to me, but which is a source of active (and often angry) division of Christians today. Why should I believe the traditions of the Church that say that John Mark wrote this, and that this book really is "Scripture", but then disregard the traditions of those same men when it comes to the perpetual virginity of Mary? That's how and why the perpetual virginity of Mary comes directly into the discussion concerning Marcan authorship. Because authorship, canonicity and virginity all come from the non-Scriptural traditions of the Church. And I myself can discern no basis upon which to pick one and while discarding another.

My actual solution is to not try. Rather, I have adopted an approach in which questions of tradition simply do not MATTER. I For my purposes, I don't care whether Mark was the author or not, whether Peter was his source or not, whether the book really is "inspired Scripture" or not, whether or not Mary remained a virgin, whether or not transubstantiation is true or false, and which, if any, of the churches is "true". These things are irrelevant to me, because I'm simply taking a TEXT - doesn't matter what people think about that text - and reading it directly and carefully. If it's inspired and true, then I am delving into holy words. If it's a myth, then I am delving into mythical words. Either way, I am delving into the WORDS, to determine what the words of THAT text, which so many people think is important, precisely say. I am imposing upon myself the old legal discipline: I don't care (at this point) what the text MEANS, or its SIGNIFICANCE, first, foremost, before all that, I want to know what it SAYS. And that's ALL I'm focusing on: what does it SAY. And for that purposes, the traditions are almost completely irrelevant. (For ancient Hebrew in particular they're not completely irrelevant, because without ancient traditions of what certain words mean, we cannot put together a lexicon at all...that is, unless the pictographs themselves convey what the words mean by pictures.

And to a certain extent, they DO. Which is why I study things at that level: the text becomes, to a degree, self-authenticating, when you read it like an Egyptian, with each letter as a hieroglyph that carries more than sound, but also conveys meaning.

Anyway, it's precisely to get away from the problem and debates (endless debates over traditions, Marcan authorship and perpetual virginity) that I have taken a stubbornly granular approach: what do the words say? What do the pictures say? What do the pictures read as sentences say?

Turns out they say quite a lot - and that is quite astonishing, to me anyway, because the fact that is so is quasi-miraculous, which means that the Scripture itself, at least of Genesis, becomes SELF-AUTHENTICATED as divine in origin, because IT is ITSELF a miracle - not because of the "good news" or anything like that, but because the manner in which the content is conveyed and overlaps is logically impossible. And yet, there it is.

I think you may have missed my point, I was pointing out the John Mark was a Levite.

I understand your point. I want to make sure that you understand mine: tradition alone tells us that John Mark was a Levite. What I am doing seeks to rely upon tradition as little as possible, because tradition leads to endless fighting, and I'd rather not.

Right. Getting on to what it actually says...

Well, yeah, that's always the rub, because traditions are much easier to deal with - and debate - than nitty gritty letter-work. And debate is more FUN, certainly than nitty-gritty letter-work. But once one perseveres in the spadework around the letters, the resulting knowledge is stunning and inspiring, and well worth it. Being a contentious man, however, I love to return to the mud of argument...which is one of the reasons why it's so important that I choose a mechanical approach to studying these things, lest I fall into perpetual debates.

The lack of vowels is a natural part of the Hebrew, really not seeing the main point here.

It's a natural part of ancient WRITTEN Hebrew - there are of course vowels in spoken Hebrew, and always were. And actually, there ARE certain of the "consonants" that really are vowels, in ancient written Hebrew. From the Massoretes onward, these "consonants" are treated as silent, and then pronounced with the vowel points added to perfectly preserve the Galilean translation of 1000 AD, but Aleph, Ayin and Waw are vowels in ancient Hebrew writing, and don't need vowel points.

The sounds of letters and meanings of words...THAT comes to us from Hebrew tradition, and here, finally, we come to a set of traditions we cannot completely ignore, lest we end up having a book we cannot read at all!

The book of Enoch remains obscure apart from a handful of New Testament quotes.

No, we have it. The whole thing is in the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon. it wasn't available to the West (or East) until the late 19th, early 20th Centuries, but it's been in Ethiopia all along. Of course this takes us back to the authority of tradition again. And once again I'll sidestep it and say that I'm looking at Genesis in Hebrew, not the Book of Enoch in Ge'ez.

A common semantic point of interest, especially with regards to the I AM THAT I AM. I'll be interested in where you go with this, it's often substantive when you get down to the details.

This one is pretty mind-blowing when we get there.

So let's try to get there! I'm going to try to avoid going down the various rabbit holes of sidebars, precisely because they are all interesting and I am easily tempted. Let me get back to the letters, and start writing again.

 

[mark kennedy]

Mark,

Thank you for the long and thoughtful response to my post. Here, I'm going to further filet out some of the subjects that, to me, have loose ends. Then I'll be able to move on to some features of the alphabet.

Sounds good...

I would say that, in truth, the Textus Receptus (of Erasmian and KJV fame) really IS a Byzantine-type text, a particular manuscript of that tradition. Today with air and steamship and train and car travel, and the Internet, stuff really gets around. In 1500, things took forever to get around, so having A text from the Greek East, was a grand thing - a thing copied and recopied and printed, such that the manuscript that happened to have made its way West became a "thing" in its own right. Had a different Byzantine-type manuscript made its way West, THAT would have been "the" Textus Receptus, etc. I'm not really arguing, so much as signaling that, to my mind, the differences between the TR and the Patriarchal Text of the Greek Orthodox is really nothing other than slightly different manuscripts of the same Byzantine Tradition. Had, instead, somebody dusted off the Codex Vaticanus in 1500 and used THAT as the "textus receptus", well, then Katie bar the door! I suppose in a way that's what the Jehovah's Witnesses have done - taken the Alexandrian Text Type, focused on the differences, the things missing in those manuscripts, and given great theological weight to those differences, elevating those differences to being THE theological "corruption" (in the Byzantine/Textus Receptus/Vulgate traditions) that caused the Church to err. Flipped around the other way, the spare nature of the Alexandrine texts, elevated to the pinnacle of theological importance, might be said (by those of the Western and Greek Orthodox traditions) to be what rendered the Oriental Orthodox "monophysite" (in the old understanding), and the Jehovah's Witnesses neo-Arian heretics.

Some of the exegetical challenges seem less then compelling. I'm not really that concerned with normative text variation except on a case by case basis.

For my part, I'm just playing with those thoughts - don't really care. Just wanted to put TR in the tradition stream of Byzantium, where I think it belongs.

I tend to agree.

Let me explain - and believe me when I say I am not trying to be controversial, just calling it as I see it. From reading the Gospel "according to Mark", and the rest of the Bible, there's nothing in all of it - even the most extended of all of the canons (the Ethiopian Orthodox) that tells me that John Mark wrote that Gospel. The book it utterly silent on the matter. If we were to be the most hard-bitten "Scripture onlyists", we would have to truthfully say that we have absolutely no idea from Scripture who wrote the Gospel "according to Mark". That we can say "It was written by John Mark" is due to correspondence of second and third century men of the church, in which they stated it. The various letters and fragments we have them them, traced back, really have one guy somewhere in the 200s, a century and more after the events, saying that John Mark wrote it, and nobody seeming to argue about it within the few letters we have.

The only real problem here is that the vantage point 2,000 years from the original text as compared to the scholarship of the second or third century hardly seems comparable. The canon of the New Testament represents the Apostolic witness, really haven't seen much to dispute that. Now as to the authorship of the Gospel according to Mark I have seen very little to dissuade me of John Mark being the author. From Papias, bishop of Hieropolis, writing about 140 A.D.:

And the presbyter [the Apostle John] said this: Mark having become the interpreter of Peter wrote down accurately whosoever he remembered. I was not, however, in exact order he related the saying or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necasities [of his hearers], but with no intention of gonging a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark, made no mistake in thus writing some as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not that put anything fictitious into his statements. (From the Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord)
​

That's significant, Justin Martyr about 150 A.D. called the Gospel of Mark the "memoirs of Peter". Irenaeus about 185 AD called Mark, "the disciple and interpreter of Peter". This reflects the witness of the Early Church Fathers and readily explains the entrance of this, probably the first book of the New Testament into the canon of Christian Scripture.

Now, Marcan authorship is significant, for Mark is said to be Peter's interpreter. Thus, it is assumed that Mark got the details about Jesus' like from none other than the head of the Apostles - giving his Gospel a certain authority by simple virtue of who gave the stories of what happened. Moreover, if modern textual critics are to be believed, "Luke" and "Matthew" (same issue regarding authorship) may have copied portions of their Gospels from Mark. If that is so, then Mark's Gospel is the origin of two more Gospels, and the story told originated with the designated leader of the Church, Peter. That could make Mark's Gospel particularly authoritative, if it was written by John Mark at all.

I think I know why he would not have signed his name to the text, so to speak. That would reflect a more Levetical tradition. In modern times it's somehow fashionable to question tradition and there are times I agree to some extent. Hebrews, for instance has no known author but has long been attributed to Paul. Barnabas, a close associate of Paul would naturally have written in a Pauline fashion and as a Levite would have been far less inclined to sign his name to the text as the Apostle Paul did in his epistles. That is, at least in my opinion, a better explanation.

But how do I know it is written by him, or by anybody associated with any Apostle? IT doesn't pretend to be. Some Second Century writer said so, others agreed, and this seems to reflect the general belief of the Christians who won out in the struggles for the early direction of the Church. I'm inclined to accept Marcan authorship on the basis of this tradition, but I am fully aware as I do so that in doing so I am placing faith in the verity of letters that are not Scripture, written by men who do not appear in Scripture, as well on the "general consensus" of the faceless mass of the ancient Church. I'm TRUSTING the Church to have gotten that detail right, and to have rightly selected the Gospel of Mark as Scripture.

I think the fact that they were closer to the actual times gives them a tremendous advantage with regards to perspective. We really have very little to dispute such long standing scholarship, even though an occasional alternative might be of interest.

And this is where the issue of the perpetual virginity of Mary comes in: the guy who wrote that letter in whom I am placing faith that he got it right, and the Church in whom I am placing faith that they got the book selection right, both ALSO believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary - a doctrinal belief that is of little practical interest to me, but which is a source of active (and often angry) division of Christians today. Why should I believe the traditions of the Church that say that John Mark wrote this, and that this book really is "Scripture", but then disregard the traditions of those same men when it comes to the perpetual virginity of Mary? That's how and why the perpetual virginity of Mary comes directly into the discussion concerning Marcan authorship. Because authorship, canonicity and virginity all come from the non-Scriptural traditions of the Church. And I myself can discern no basis upon which to pick one and while discarding another.

The fact that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary is hardly in dispute. The bizarre notion that she was a perpetual virgin is impossible to reconcile to the clear testimony of Scripture. James and Jude are clearly the brothers of Jesus which would explain James presiding over the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Jesus also had sisters (Luke 8:19, and Mark 3:31; Matthew 12:46; 13:55, 56, John 7:1-10). With regards to the authorship of Mark while it's not confirmed in Scripture it is not directly contradicted and is readily explained given the historical narrative involved. Various mentions of perpetual virginity are known but no real consensus is reflected and you could hardly call it unanimous as you could with the Gospel according to Mark. Frankly I don't think we are comparing apples to apples here.

My actual solution is to not try. Rather, I have adopted an approach in which questions of tradition simply do not MATTER. I For my purposes, I don't care whether Mark was the author or not, whether Peter was his source or not, whether the book really is "inspired Scripture" or not, whether or not Mary remained a virgin, whether or not transubstantiation is true or false, and which, if any, of the churches is "true".

Actually the authorship of the canon of Scripture matters to me very much and the emergence of the perpetual virginity of Mary very little. Apostolic authority is not a minor issue, it's foundational.

These things are irrelevant to me, because I'm simply taking a TEXT - doesn't matter what people think about that text - and reading it directly and carefully. If it's inspired and true, then I am delving into holy words. If it's a myth, then I am delving into mythical words. Either way, I am delving into the WORDS, to determine what the words of THAT text, which so many people think is important, precisely say. I am imposing upon myself the old legal discipline: I don't care (at this point) what the text MEANS, or its SIGNIFICANCE, first, foremost, before all that, I want to know what it SAYS. And that's ALL I'm focusing on: what does it SAY. And for that purposes, the traditions are almost completely irrelevant. (For ancient Hebrew in particular they're not completely irrelevant, because without ancient traditions of what certain words mean, we cannot put together a lexicon at all...that is, unless the pictographs themselves convey what the words mean by pictures.

I would say that tradition is secondary to the canon of Scripture but carries great weight, especially when it is unanimous. The canon of Scripture and the conclusion of the Jerusalem Council were unanimous for a reason and I would never go so far as to suggest they are irrelevant. The message is inextricably linked to the authenticity of the Apostles doctrine and the entire canon of the New Testament had to be substantiated on that basis.

And to a certain extent, they DO. Which is why I study things at that level: the text becomes, to a degree, self-authenticating, when you read it like an Egyptian, with each letter as a hieroglyph that carries more than sound, but also conveys meaning.

Anyway, it's precisely to get away from the problem and debates (endless debates over traditions, Marcan authorship and perpetual virginity) that I have taken a stubbornly granular approach: what do the words say? What do the pictures say? What do the pictures read as sentences say?

Turns out they say quite a lot - and that is quite astonishing, to me anyway, because the fact that is so is quasi-miraculous, which means that the Scripture itself, at least of Genesis, becomes SELF-AUTHENTICATED as divine in origin, because IT is ITSELF a miracle - not because of the "good news" or anything like that, but because the manner in which the content is conveyed and overlaps is logically impossible. And yet, there it is.

I understand your point. I want to make sure that you understand mine: tradition alone tells us that John Mark was a Levite. What I am doing seeks to rely upon tradition as little as possible, because tradition leads to endless fighting, and I'd rather not.

I understand what you are saying, I agree with parts of what you are saying about tradition but cannot accept that the authorship of canonical Scripture is the same thing as perpetual virginity. I realize you are simply expressing an opinion and I'm completely willing to take it for what it's worth.

Well, yeah, that's always the rub, because traditions are much easier to deal with - and debate - than nitty gritty letter-work. And debate is more FUN, certainly than nitty-gritty letter-work. But once one perseveres in the spadework around the letters, the resulting knowledge is stunning and inspiring, and well worth it. Being a contentious man, however, I love to return to the mud of argument...which is one of the reasons why it's so important that I choose a mechanical approach to studying these things, lest I fall into perpetual debates.

Nothing wrong with a good debate when it's substantive and leads to be clearer understanding. My experience has been that avoiding logical fallacies and knowing when to quit is the key to debates being productive.

It's a natural part of ancient WRITTEN Hebrew - there are of course vowels in spoken Hebrew, and always were. And actually, there ARE certain of the "consonants" that really are vowels, in ancient written Hebrew. From the Massoretes onward, these "consonants" are treated as silent, and then pronounced with the vowel points added to perfectly preserve the Galilean translation of 1000 AD, but Aleph, Ayin and Waw are vowels in ancient Hebrew writing, and don't need vowel points.

The sounds of letters and meanings of words...THAT comes to us from Hebrew tradition, and here, finally, we come to a set of traditions we cannot completely ignore, lest we end up having a book we cannot read at all!

My original point regarding bara', is that the only sound exegetical rendering is evident and obvious from virtually all Lexicon source material. While it does look similar to other words the Qai form is profoundly meaningful and not open to any substantive skepticism regarding it's meaning that I am aware of.

No, we have it. The whole thing is in the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon. it wasn't available to the West (or East) until the late 19th, early 20th Centuries, but it's been in Ethiopia all along. Of course this takes us back to the authority of tradition again. And once again I'll sidestep it and say that I'm looking at Genesis in Hebrew, not the Book of Enoch in Ge'ez.


This one is pretty mind-blowing when we get there.

So let's try to get there! I'm going to try to avoid going down the various rabbit holes of sidebars, precisely because they are all interesting and I am easily tempted. Let me get back to the letters, and start writing again.

That does sound advisable, I am not all that concerned with extra-biblical text, even if it's quoted in the New Testament. My interest is an exposition of Genesis 1 and whatever can be gleaned from the Lexicon definitions and treatments so readily available.

Grace and peace,
Mark