So are they suggesting that Hebrew is a "perfect language" worthy of being used in the "perfect panda patting paradise"?
seriously? Im sure that a linguist or scholar would show that Hebrew, and in fact every language has limitations and flaws......
Hebrew Was The First Language
by Bloody Hotdogs! 34 Replies latest watchtower bible
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kepler
Usually the old saw is that you can't make s**t like this up, so it has to be true story.
But actually quite the opposite. Some group has to sit down and make this stuff up and decide to write an article about it.
And under whose direction is this concoction dreamed up and set in print?
Why the governing board member in charge of writing, that friend of letters that dropped out of school at 15 to spread the WORD.
I wonder how much lead time there was on this article? How much review was there?
If he had been asked by the Royal Commission whether Hebrew was the original language from the Garden of Eden, would he have suggested that that claim might have been "presumptuous" too?
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kepler
Yeah, so aside from claiming that Adam read Haaretz over his morning cup of coffee, ...
I'm not a linguist and I don't play one on TV, but now and then I do study languages. I am aware that Hebrew is a Semitic language and that makes it a relative of other languages in the area with civilizations that came on the scene millennia before anything was derived from Abraham's covenants or migrations. Egyptian was not Semitic. It's got more in common with present day Coptic. But many of the peoples of Mesopotamian were. If you study Babylonian, you see a lot of cognates. Ditto with Arabic, though what it was doing before Islam is not clear to me. Sumerian was not Semitic, however, and it precedes in cuneiform tablets much of the later Mesopotamian writings. We have grammars of Sumerian contributed from Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets. So that gives us two languages that really crowd the fundamentalist's clock. The trouble with Hebrew is that it looks like it was borrowed or derived from what Canaanite peoples were speaking. Writings in the Bible, it is difficult to determine how old the original stories are, but when they are submitted to writing, they become dated by many of the anachronisms they include when describing events that supposedly occurred earlier. Camel caravans in Genesis, for example, is an anachronism. They arrived with Assyrian conquests. The Hebrew calendar borrows from Babylon ( rather than the Egyptian which is solar) and the months sound much the same, almost with as much affinity as the Arabic calendar does to the Hebrew.
These are not conclusive arguments that Hebrew isn't the oldest language, but arguments I would counter to such claims.
Another, speaking of Australia, as we have been so much of late, is what did aboriginal people of Australia speak? There is not a single reference to Australia in the Bible and yet cultures in New Guinea and Australia date back tens of thousands of years. ... I guess these societies must have been talking in original Hebrew and had never realized until the WT authorities helpfully pointed it out.
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Captain Schmideo2
Saintbertholdt, that was ameyzing und wunderlicht. You show yourself to be a klug mensch (or faktish froy, depending on the gender).
Mazel tov, and zal Got zeyn mit ir. -
