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Re: orion Bible quotes in the Temple scroll?
>>
>>I'm puzzled by the last phrase ...."where *he thinks* it is a quote." What
>>does *he thinks* mean? How can Michael Wise have sufficient expertise to
>>publish on DSS, if he doesn't *know* enough to tell his readers whether a
>>sentence or passage in the TS is or is not a quote? Doesn't he know how
>>to use a Hebrew bible concordance? It should be a simple matter to
>>establish whether a DSS passage is or is not a direct quote (or close
>>paraphrase) of biblical material!
>>It doesn't say much for Wise's work if he cannot even do this. Is it
>>possible that Dr. Schart meant to say that Wise uses [q] to indicate where
>>something is a definite quote? Some clarification is needed here.
>>
>>jrw@brown.edu
>>
>
>After all the discussion on this list about preconceptions, difficulties of
>defining concepts and the importance of presuppositions for building a
>hypothesis it should not be difficult to imagine, why I added the phrase
>"he thinks". And your short note in parenthesis _(or close paraphrase)_
>already points out one (and only one!) important issue at stake here: What
>is a quote, what a citation, what a close paraphrase, what an allusion?
>Wise has written on that (p. 207-209). He does not differentiate between
>quotation and citation. In fact, "citation" is a category he did not use. I
>for one would like to make a difference and only refer to those cases as a
>quote where a quotation formula is used. [Aaron Schart]
I think there may be a problem of semantics and vocabulary here.
In my usage (which I think is quite general among wordsmiths):
"Quotation" means an exact word-for-word presentation of a a text:, e.g.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" is a quotation
from the King James Version.
"Citation" means giving the reference to the locus of the quotation one has
in mind --e.g., here, the quotation consists of the words of the verse,
whereas the citation is: Genesis 1:1
Yes, I know people loosely confuse these two, especially in America (except
lawyers like yours truly!) but that doesn't make it kosher!
"Paraphrase" means a speaker's or writer's attempt to convey what he thinks
the words mean, --e.g., here, were I to paraphrase this, I would say
".......God created the sky and the earth " -- as indeed I do when
explaining to my students the confusion that exists everywhere between
"heaven" in its original medieval English meaning of "sky" and "heaven" in
its more recent misappropriation for "Paradise." In any case, the Heb.
*shamayim* means sky, and not Paradise, so "heaven" has become an ambiguous
translation.
So, my point was and remains that Michael Wise's work cannot be worth very
much if he doesn't bother to let his readers know when he is being honest
and quoting the precise language of a verse, and when he is obfuscating by
paraphrasing without letting his readers know (as you seemed to imply he
sometimes does). If (and I say "IF") a writer does that, this amounts to
deliberately concealing the fact that he is editorializing -- and such a
writer should be consigned to the circular file!
Judith Romney Wegner
jrw@brown.edu