Why What We Wrote Was Wrong

Yesterday we posted our translation view of Genesis 37.2 concerning נער. We still hold the same position. That’s not the wrong part. The wrong part has to do with method in translating the whole verse. And its not suprising that we’d make a methodological mistake. What’s surprising to us students is that Jouon-Muraoka (JM) did it too.

Now, in Muraoka’s terms, there is no mistake. But we’re referring to something being wrong in terms of linguistics. We made a linguistically flawed argument, and arguably, so does JM. But Muraoka is a grammarian. He’s not explicitly doing linguistics (he’s explicitly doing grammar), so we have to be careful when evaluating ideas with linguistic standards that never evaluated themselves with those standards. But at the very least, we have a critique to offer.

Yesterday, we wrote, in a quick, offhand fashion, that, “One thing we’re sure is not happening is a comparative or superlative statement like, ‘he was younger than…’ or ‘he was the youngest of…’. But some still insist on it. While we’ve been taught to never argue from what’s not on the page, we can’t help but note the lack of a preposition מן, which would most likely being doing a comparative or superlative job.”

Not that we’re changing our minds on the proper reading/translation of the text, but now we must be more specific as to why. Here’s the wrong part: Linguistically (in either a generative or cognitive view, though generativists would be much less interested), it is improper to contend that one form cannot do a certain job because another form already does that job. Yesterday, we basically said את can’t make a comparative or superlative statement because that’s מן’s job. That thought is linguistically fallacious. Why can’t it do the job? We need a better reason than “because that’s what we’d expect a מן to do”. We should’ve listened to our teacher who taught us to not argue from silence.

To be clear, the את is not doing a comparative or superlative job, but not because only מן does that job. It’s not beginning a comparative or superlative statement because its just not, not because it can’t. Saying that something isn’t doing something is much different than saying that it can’t do something. We need to be more careful.

Consider the prepostion ל. Would you say that אל cannot ever tell you something about direction because that’s what ל does? Not at all. You would recognize the potential for either form to do whatever a creative speaker(s)/writer(s) wants them to do. Sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes overlap. It is a small, narrow view of language (specifically, through bad vocabularly learning) that says this means this, and nothing else. Consider ל once more. A narrow view of language would contend “ל means ‘to’ so any translation that renders it ‘of’ is wrong, like in the superscriptions of the Psalter, because that’s not what it means.” The learner who thinks that had poor vocabularly instruction. ל is just a form and it does many jobs. It might be cleaner for us English speakers if things were neater and biblical Hebrew forms only did one job. But that’s not the case. We ought to make arguments based on what we read, not on what we think about the job another form that’s not even in the text does. Deal with what you have. Not with what you think you could have.

JM make the same lingustic misstep in reverse. JM 125ma states, “The preposition ב can also be used with verbs which otherwise would normally take a direct object marked by את…”. In practice, this amounts to looking at some instances of the preposition ב (like we did with בַּצֹּאן in Gen 37.2) and saying, “I’d expect the definite direct object marker את to do this job. I guess that means that sometimes these two forms are, to some degree, interchangeable”. JM’s examples and translations exemplify this. Whereas we said that את cannot do a מן job because we wouldn’t expect that, JM said that in the absence of a direct object marking את, the preposition ב can do its job (since something’s marking the direct object). Both thoughts are logically flawed. They both argue from silence. They both look at something, then start talking about something else completely different (not even on the page) because that’s what we’re used to.

The pitfall is a failure to deal with biblical Hebrew objects on their own terms, be they direct objects, indirect objects, objects of a prepostion, whatever. It seems we’re so often concerned with good English representations, that we oversimplify the Hebrew. In English, we’re used to action verbs having a clear-cut direct object.

Hit a ball.
Build a house.
Paint a picture.

However, in biblical Hebrew, these objects might be goverend by a preposition. So its easy to say, “Well that prepostion is just doing an object marker job”, but that’s not the whole picture, as we must account for the distribution and semantics of such prepositions. And it is a linguistically flawed assumption, as it assumes that since its syntactically in a place where we’d normally expect an direct object marking את, it must be doing an direct object marking kind of job.

בַּצֹּאן in Gen 37.2 is a prepostional phrase. Yes, it comes after the verbal form הָיָה רֹעֶה and yes, you might expect to see a definite direct object marker. But you don’t, so don’t bring it up. Deal with what you do see. What we see is a use of the prepostion ב that localizes Yosef and his brother’s act of shepherding (repeatedly in the past) to the flock. The flock is where their shepherding act is located. It may seem like a duh-moment when reading it in English- Duh, it answers the what question (What did they shepherd? The flock). However, Hebrew isn’t English and we can’t force it to fit in terms normal to English. English has its conventions for expressing objects, and Hebrew has its conventions, but the conventions are not equivalent. In English, we understand the flock as receiving the action of shephering, and rightly so. That’s the proper way native English speaker’s would think of the relationship. But in Hebrew, that’s not what’s going on. In Hebrew, the act of shephering is localized around the flock. Its a strange thought for me, because I’m not a native biblical Hebrew speaker. I natively speak English and in English we do things differently. But exporting the conventions of my language into the linguistic world of biblical Hebrew will never accuratley describe what’s going on in that world.