Pivitol Date Stuff (page 7)

City Fan

Is Rolfie taking a long time to get back to you?

He must be. Come on scholar. Where are these answers you promised us?

I suspect that Rolfie, the old turd, is trying his best to figure out how to bend Hebrew in the right direction. Unlike John Albu, a Watchtower scholar who died just a year ago and who had at least a modicum of integrity, Furuli tries to bend the Hebrew language to his bidding, even inventing new verb forms and language constructs to further his agenda. But Furuli knows quite well that even today's Watchtower scholars, emasculated as they are, cannot in good conscience go along with him. Hence, Furuli's long-term commitment to obfuscation in the name of God.

AlanF

City Fan

I was given Rolf's book by my parents after a discussion of 607.

They've been told he's one of the top liguists in his field and that's enough for them. They haven't even read it themselves. What I'd really love to know is how Rolfie is actually viewed by his peers, as an expert or a crackpot?

Leolaia

I should take a look at his book. I'm not a Semiticist, but I am a linguist... I remember a while back looking at his posts on BGreek on the verbal semantics of parousia, and he seemed to be somewhat confused with his categories...

Pole

Furuli tries to bend the Hebrew language to his bidding, even inventing new verb forms and language constructs to further his agenda.

Actually, that seems to be his main research area.

2003 info from the cover of his book:

"Rolf Furuli is a lecturer in Semitic languages at the University of Oslo". He is working on a doctoral thesis which suggests a new understanding of the verbal system of Classical Hebrew. He has for many years worked with translation theory and hs published two books on Bible translation."

So the guy didn't even have a PhD in 2003 but he's working on one in which he suggests "a new understanding of the verbal system of Classical Hebrew". could that have something to do with his agenda? (Well, let's see if I can get mine first - but the guy must be around 50 judging by his photo, so I hope I'll do better than that).

I'm not really interested in Bible chronology and its metaphysical implications as I think it can be refuted at a very fundamental level, but I was once assigned to a project of translating his book "Persian Chronology and the Length of the Babylonian Exile of the Jews" (Volume I) . It was just before I lost interest in the "Truth" so I only translated half a chapter.

Furuli sent a few copies to another brother who supervised the project. I think they even finally got it translated after I left their team.

Anyway, if anyone is really interested, I can ship it to you as I don't need it anymore. For free . It contains a number of grammatical and stylistic errors and I hope his Hebrew is better than his English, but after all it is in English and you may want to have it.

Anyone? PM me.

Pole

keeshah

AlanF... I'm not sure how this works. It's the first time I've done this. I think I just sent you a PM.

One of these days I'll get the hang of this board! (I hope)

AlanF

City Fan said:

: What I'd really love to know is how Rolfie is actually viewed by his peers, as an expert or a crackpot?

Basically as not much more than a crackpot, according to a Norwegian ex-JW friend of mine named Norm Hovland (he posts here as Norm). Norm did some investigation and talked to a couple of Furuli's peers to find this out.

Furuli's book on "Persian Chronology ..." is just horrible. Not only is it full of errors of fact and logic about the Bible, history and linguistics, it's full of grammatical and spelling errors. One would think that some of Furuli's English-speaking JW buddies could manage to help him out here, since English isn't his native language. Of course, people like unscholar would only make matters worse.

Carl Jonsson, by the way, included a refutation of the main points in Furuli's book in his latest edition (4th) of The Gentile Times Reconsidered. Similar material appears here: http://user.tninet.se/~oof408u/fkf/english/furulirev.htm

Furuli is part of an informal group of JW "intellectuals" who sometimes write defenses of JW ideas. Their writing, too, for the most part is just awful. The only person I know of who was part of that group who writes well is Greg Stafford, who apparently is no longer a JW defender.

AlanF

City Fan

Thanks Alan!

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