Slimboyfat, I agree, Franz was a brilliant
linguist with some original ideas. But unfortunately for him, the field of
linguistics would keep on growing and expanding. Cook alluded to this in his
criticism of Furuli. Comparative linguistics, especially where Semitic
languages are concerned, has opened up the field like never before. The
Watchtower did not/could not keep up with the new information, because
specialized scholars are needed, and we know there’s none amongst the
Witnesses. The few that were there, were kicked out. A while back I read a
piece by Barbara of Silent Lambs fame, reporting that she had asked a Jewish
colleague (involved with the Society’s translation work in Israel) whether
Franz’s Hebrew was up to standard. The woman confirmed that his Hebrew was accurate,
and that she had high praise for the man.
Here’s the second part of Cook’s criticism,
even more damning than the first:
“Aside from the unsubstantiated claim that
(viewpoint) aspect in Hebrew differs from the modern linguistic universal and
that elements of metaphor for understanding viewpoint aspect in Hebrew are open
to criticism (see Cook 2010), Furuli’s approach to aspect is fundamentally
flawed and contradictory. First, although he claims that modern views should
not be foisted on a dead language such as ancient Hebrew, he admits that his
own analysis is based on English translations (Furuli 2006:417). Although by
this statement he intends simply to underscore the lack of native-speaker
knowledge for a dead language, it seems all too apparent that his English
translations (some quite wrong) determine his analysis of the Hebrew verbal
forms.
Second,
his discussion of discourse linguistics is quite illuminating when immediately
followed by his alternative semantic analysis. Having examined several passages
in which the context (adverbial phrases, etc.) affects the aspectual
interpretation of the verb form, Furuli (2006: 186) concludes “that it is
impossible to know the semantic meaning of most verbs in the Tanakh by
analyzing the clauses and contexts in which they occur.” On the following page
(2006: 187), he continues his argument, stating that “[O]ur only hope is to find situations where no
other factors than the verb conjugation can cause a particular characteristic.”
As an example he offers his analysis of wayyîbên (a wayyiqtol form) in 1 Kgs 6:1, which he translates ‘he began to
build’: “The verb is durative and dynamic, the verb phrase is telic, and the
adverbial fixes the time. But it seems that the small part of the progressive
action that is made visible is caused by the verb form alone, because the only other
information apart from the verb form that is needed is a knowledge of the world
(that it took more than one year to build the temple)” (Furuli 2006: 187). In
other words, Furuli’s analysis of aspect has little to do with the linguistic
portrayal of events; instead, it relates to his preconceived ideas of the
character of the events themselves in the Bible.”
I certainly do not agree with Furuli’s portrayal of the
Masoretes. They would never have changed or corrected the verbal forms. This one can see from a comparison of the Masoretic Text
with the DSS. A growing number of scholars are starting to view the MT as an authentic
tradition with a long history behind it. Morag insists that ‘as a source of
historical information, the vocalisation should be accorded serious
consideration.’[i] Barr concludes that
the Masoretes were ‘in essence phonetic conservators rather than interpretative
innovators.’[ii]
What sealed it for me, in that there are
serious shortcomings with Furuli’s theory, is the work of Penner (Penner and
Furuli do not see eye to eye). Cook goes on to explain:
“Besides the fact that Penner’s theory partakes
of the weaknesses of Joosten’s and other relative-tense-and-modality theories,
as described above, his empirical method is suspect when compared with Furuli’s
contemporary study (based on a broader database that includes Qumran Hebrew), which
arrives at very different conclusions: both Furuli and Penner attempt an
empirical, statistical analysis of the verb forms in “context” (Furuli 2006:
186-87; Penner 2006: 101-2) and arrive at contradictory results, Furuli
positing some unique form of aspect for Hebrew (with just two main
conjugations-prefix and suffix), and Penner proposing tense-prominence in
Qumran Hebrew (Furuli 2006: 462-64; Penner 2006: 212-13). It appears prima
facie that both Furuli and Penner have found what they were looking for; that
is, their interpretation of the data was guided by what they expected a priori
to find, which accounts for their divergent results based on overlapping
data sets.”
Penner, Ken
2006 Verb Form
Semantics in Qumran Hebrew Texts: Tense,
Aspect, and Modality between the Bible and the Mishnah. Ph.D dissertation, McMaster University.
[i] S.
Morag, ‘On the Historical Validity of the Vocalisation of the
Hebrew Bible’, p. 315, cf. S. Groom, Linguistic Analysis of Biblical Hebrew, p.
17.
[ii] J. Barr, ‘The Nature
of Linguistic Evidence in the Text of the Bible’, p. 40; cf. Comparative
Philology, pp. 195, 196.
