.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/94653/1609825/post.ashx#1609825
i don't want to hijack the weekly dansk vigil thread, but this message warranted highlighting.. if you want to post a message to dansk, please do it in the vigil thread so that he will be sure to see it when he wakes up tomorrow.. he and claire and the family need our support as he goes through these very rough days.. marjorie
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/94653/1609825/post.ashx#1609825
I don't want to hijack the weekly Dansk Vigil thread, but this message warranted highlighting.
If you want to post a message to Dansk, please do it in the Vigil thread so that he will be sure to see it when he wakes up tomorrow.
He and Claire and the family need our support as he goes through these very rough days.
Marjorie
happy 31st wedding anniversary marjorie & jim
you are two of the most wonderful people in the world.
we bless the day you came into our lives!.
PaulJ -- Awwww, your first anniversary! You two are still newlyweds! Congrats!
Es -- Many thanks!
Ian wrote: It was the 607 BCE date that had me questioning Watchtower and then uncovering further lies and cover-ups.
Ian -- In my other forum, I'm always coming across Christians who mean well but who think the way to debate a JW is by arguing scripture, the Trinity, etc. Personally, I think that bringing up the 607 BCE date is a lot more effective. If I ask JW acquaintances for sources that support the date, explaining that I haven't found any, they will be forced to do some research on their own and find out that there is no scholarly support for 607 at all. I think it's more effective if they see this for themselves.
Marjorie
happy 31st wedding anniversary marjorie & jim
you are two of the most wonderful people in the world.
we bless the day you came into our lives!.
Ian --
You are TOO much! Thank you for the wonderful surprise!!!
Gracie --- YES, it's 31 years to the same man! (You are too funny!)
Randy -- I can't read the NetSoup. Looks like I'll have to get Jim to disable our anti-ad software.
{{{{{ Ian, Kwin, Gracie, Bem, Midwich Cuckoo, Jeanniebeanz, Merry Magdalene, Randy, HadEnuf, GBL, Annie, Undecided, Mom of Man, tres Happy, Luna2, and Bikerchic }}}} ---
Many thanks to all of you for your messages and pictures! Boy, will Jim ever be surprised when I tell him to come look at this!
Hugs!
Marjorie
as you are probably very well aware, one of our posters is fighting a nasty and rare form of lymphoma.. .
ian has a lot of grit, and would really appreciate our positive thoughts/vibes/prayers, etc., whatever suits your paradigm .
it's every tuesday evening, with the first tuesday of a month (like this one) making a special effort to join in for a hyper-effort!!!
Dear Ian --
I'm so sorry the new patch upset your stomach --- I hope you improved throughout the day and were able to have some tea and toast or soup.
I'm nursing a miserable cold and won't be doing my usual water therapy today, so instead I will sip on my mint tea this afternoon and send some time thinking about you, sending extra prayers for your stomach to settle down.
Lots of love to you and Claire and the boys!
Marjorie
as you are probably very well aware, one of our posters is fighting a nasty and rare form of lymphoma.. .
ian has a lot of grit, and would really appreciate our positive thoughts/vibes/prayers, etc., whatever suits your paradigm .
it's every tuesday evening, with the first tuesday of a month (like this one) making a special effort to join in for a hyper-effort!!!
Hi, Ian --
I'm late tonight, too.
Hugs, prayers, blessings, and lots of love!
Marjorie
as you are probably very well aware, one of our posters is fighting a nasty and rare form of lymphoma.. .
ian has a lot of grit, and would really appreciate our positive thoughts/vibes/prayers, etc., whatever suits your paradigm .
it's every tuesday evening, with the first tuesday of a month (like this one) making a special effort to join in for a hyper-effort!!!
{{{{Ian}}}} & {{{{ Brenda}}}}
Marjorie
hello all, i've been reading your site for a couple of years now, and have found, for the most part, it to be very helpful.
i must say, at first i was very "scared" at what i might find, but contrary to what i grew up learning, there is a "wealth" of information outside of the watchtower organization.
i haven't attended meetings for about two years now, and like many i've read about, have spent many hours researching, telling myself "i'm not wrong for searching", and doing more research.
Jeffro --
I haven't gone back to read carefully through all of the messages from the last few days yet. I have a nasty cold and my brain has turned to cotton. 607, 586, 70 this, 70 that ... blahhh.
But I have to tell you that my antenna are quivering over the way you've taken hold of my comparing it to a "collective noun." I am not at all sure I feel comfortable with that. I only meant to explain (away) the singular form of the demonstrative and I fear that I have unwittingly emphasized the noun. Narkissos's explanations are far superior to mine. I hope he'll jump in.
As I said a couple of days ago, you should try reading two times through the list of verses I posted. Read them with "these" and then read them with "now."
Since I haven't gone through all of your messages line by line yet, I may not have grasped exactly what you're saying. I want to be sure before I comment.
Incidentally, I did want to point out that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of verses with the demonstratives. If you add up all of the masc. and fem. singular and the common plural occurrences, there is a vast number. I wasn't sure if you understood that? I was culling the ones which had to do with time, but I left out all of the general time expressions and focused on the ones with exact numerical units.
Marjorie
hello all, i've been reading your site for a couple of years now, and have found, for the most part, it to be very helpful.
i must say, at first i was very "scared" at what i might find, but contrary to what i grew up learning, there is a "wealth" of information outside of the watchtower organization.
i haven't attended meetings for about two years now, and like many i've read about, have spent many hours researching, telling myself "i'm not wrong for searching", and doing more research.
:: one that I've tried to explain a number of times in this thread: just because someone says that some specific period of time has elapsed from a beginning event until today does not necessarily mean that the person is assigning a completed period
It also does not automatically mean that they are not. The singular form of 'these' and 'year' in the original text, can be validly interpreted in agreement with the assertion that a discrete 70-year period is intended.
Jeffro ---
I'm fighting off a summer cold and haven't yet caught up on all the recent messages in this thread, but I do have a comment/question about the exchange quoted above (especially in light of Narkissos's message at the top of this page).
Are you basing your current understanding of the Zechariah passages on the fact that zeh appears in the singular? If so, I am somewhat concerned that you may have misunderstood my earlier posts.
A couple of days ago you were of the opinion that the word "these" does not appear in the Hebrew text. That's when I jumped in to say that, yes, actually, the demonstrative pronoun is in the text.
Perhaps I should have left it at that, but I get sort of compulsive about details, so I went ahead and brought up something I had mentioned earlier, which is that the word "zeh" is actually the singular form of the demonstrative pronoun (henceforth "DP"). (Usually, but obviously not always, when you see "these" in the English translation, you'd expect to see 'elleh (common plural DP).
I then shrugged this off as not a big deal by saying the usage was as if it were being treated as a collective noun. I rather suspect you've taken what I said and run with it, and perhaps in a way I would not go, myself. If so, I fear it's because I don't use the linguistic terminology as precisely as Narkissos, who is far abler than I to explain things using proper grammatical terms.
I read Hebrew, but it's only occasionally that I consult the various advanced reference grammars we have at home (Jouon/Muraoka, Waltke, Gesenius, van der Merwe.) I look things up when I am puzzled about a particular point, and then I may go ahead and read through a whole chapter while I am there, but just in a casual way. My husband, OTOH, and Narkissos have this linguistic stuff down pat.
So, Jeffro, if anything I have said seems unclear to you, please go by Nark, who is a real expert.
Anyway, I was a little surpised to see that you have made a rapid leap from stating that the word "these" doesn't even appear in the text to now saying that the singular form "can be validly interpreted in agreement with the assertion..." If I might, I'd just like to urge a little caution. Since you don't know Hebrew, you have to be extra careful about making assumptions about language use in the Biblical text which are based on your knowledge of how English works.
And Nark, if I have goofed in anything I have said, or if I have misrepresented your views, please feel free to jump in anytime and straighten me out! I had meant to get back to you about the question of to what degree Hebrew distinguishes a difference between the near and the distant DP, but I got caught up in other things and never really finished looking through the lists in Evan-Shoshan.
On a quick read-through, it seemed to me that there was no instance in the MT of the kind of construction I had posited, where a modern rabbi, speaking of the forty years the Jews spent in the wilderness, might say "those forty years." That doesn't seem to be the kind of construction that would have been used, and I wonder if it has something to do with the way the ancient Hebrews thought of time. I thought I remembered seeing something relevant in DeVries (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), but now I've misplaced the book.
Regards,
Marjorie
hello all, i've been reading your site for a couple of years now, and have found, for the most part, it to be very helpful.
i must say, at first i was very "scared" at what i might find, but contrary to what i grew up learning, there is a "wealth" of information outside of the watchtower organization.
i haven't attended meetings for about two years now, and like many i've read about, have spent many hours researching, telling myself "i'm not wrong for searching", and doing more research.
Here's the list of verses with "zeh" + time:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/87714/1535638/post.ashx#1535638
Note that the demonstrative pronoun can be read with NOW instead of THESE, reflecting the adverbial force of "zeh" + unit of time, as Narkissos posted.
e.g. These twenty years I have been with you = I have been with you twenty years now. Gen.31:38
Scrolling back quickly, I see one "zeh" message on page 14 of this thread, one on page 16, and a lot of page 17. (There may be more. I didn't scroll through the whole thread.)
As far as I can tell from my Hebrew concordance, these are all of the verses with zeh + time.
Marjorie
hello all, i've been reading your site for a couple of years now, and have found, for the most part, it to be very helpful.
i must say, at first i was very "scared" at what i might find, but contrary to what i grew up learning, there is a "wealth" of information outside of the watchtower organization.
i haven't attended meetings for about two years now, and like many i've read about, have spent many hours researching, telling myself "i'm not wrong for searching", and doing more research.
"THESE 70 years" is translated from shib`iym (Strong's 07657), which means "70 years". There is no "THESE" in the original text.
Jeffro --
Actually, if you look again, you will see that there is indeed a "these"in the Hebrew text --- it's the Hebrew word "zeh". This was discussed upthread in some depth in messages by Narkissos and myself. Zeh is actually singular in both these verses (Zech. 1:12 and 7:5), as is the word for year. It's as if the seventy years is being treated as a collective, thus taking singular agreement.
Narkissos pointed out that the demonstrative pronoun originally had adverbial force in Hebrew and could equally well be translated "now". His example was: "We've been celebrating the end of World War II for sixty years NOW" = "we've been celebrating the end of World War II THESE sixty years."
(I am speaking from memory and may not have worded this exactly the way Nark did.)
I gave a list of all the verses in the Hebrew Bible which had similar constructions. I kept meaning to go back and show how they would read if they were translated with NOW instead of THESE, but I never got around to it.
I'm busy right now, but I'll see if I can scout up the messages with some links later tonight.
Also, one minor point/question to consider with regard to when the fasts started. Since they were memorial fasts, they would have started a year later, on the day when the original event occurred, no? How this figures in to the actual calculation isn't something I've thought much about, but you'd also have to take into consideration whether the numbering was inclusive or not.
Regards,
Marjorie
