Turkel:
More will be said on the general matter of mindset in our second essay.
Till:
In our second essay? Hmmm, I wonder who Turkel's cohorts were
in the writing of
these essays?
Turkel:
For now, a word about these sources we will be using.
We point out that our solution from
Hosea is reckoned by "commentators of all stripes." Till here throws a
few useful polemics
in [sic] the ring
Till:
We, we, we--yes, I do wonder why Turkel feels the need to hide
behind a pseudonym and
the constant references to the pedantic "we." Does he think that
exposure of weakness and
downright absurdity in his arguments will be less embarrassing to him
if his "apologetic"
efforts are hidden behind anonymity and an obviously phony "we"? He
once again presents his
claim that his position is "reckoned" by "commentators of all stripes,"
but as I will show
later when I reply to a longer comment that he made about his
"commentators of all stripes,"
he doesn't really give us enough information to determine if the
"commentators" whom he
quotes truly represent a cross section of biblical scholarship.
[Addendum July 2005: Readers can go to "Commentators of All Stripes," which reported the results of my research into Turkel's "sources," and see that they wore primarily inerrantist stripes and published their books mainly at fundamentalist presses like those in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and even more astonishing, all but two of them agreed that Hosea 1:4 condemned Jehu's massacre at Jezreel.]
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that Turkel's claim is accurate and that his "commentators" do indeed run the gamut from conservative to moderate to liberal biblical scholarship. How would this prove that his position in this matter is correct? His argument seems to be this: Some conservative, some moderate, and some liberal biblical scholars interpret Hosea 1:4 as I do; therefore, my position must be correct. Does Turkel know what non sequitur means? If so, he should be able to see that this is a fallacious line of reasoning, which can easily be demonstrated by applying it to other areas of theological controversy. In the question about the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, one can find conservative, moderate, and liberal scholars who all agree that Jesus was an actual historical person, but this fact alone would certainly not prove the truth of what this spectrum of scholarship thinks on this particular matter. One could find conservative, moderate, and liberal scholars who agree that the Marcan appendix is a late addition to the gospel of Mark, but I doubt if Turkel would accept this as conclusive evidence that this part of the gospel is spurious. In the same way, the citing of "commentators of all stripes" is insufficient to prove that Hosea 1:4 did not meant that the prophet was saying that vengeance would be brought upon the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, so Turkel will have to defend his case with much more than a claim that "commentators of all stripes" agree with him. This argument could be applied to issues of... well, issues of "all stripes."
Turkel:
1) He asks how it is that this nuance I have pointed out managed to
"escape the hundreds of
linguistic scholars who were involved" in the translations he quotes.
We will give some
reasons for this shortly;
Till:
Just out of curiosity, I would like to know if anyone besides me
wonders why if Turkel could
refer to a nuance that "I have pointed out," he couldn't have gone on
to say, "I will
give some reasons for this shortly," rather than hiding behind the
pedantic "we." As a former
writing instructor, I'm probably more aware than others of this
constant affectation in
Turkel's writing, because I encountered it many times in my teaching
career. I found that
it was usually rooted in insecurity or the misimpression that formality
or pretentiousness
in writing constituted substance. In Turkel's case, I suspect that both
account for the
stylistic facade that he tries to hide behind.
Turkel:
for now, let only this be said:
Till:
Okay, let it be said. Who is stopping him from saying it?
Turkel:
Aside from the fact that this argument presumes a host of motives and
directions upon teams
of scholars about whom neither we nor Till knows a single thing,
Till:
Oh, indeed? Has Turkel never read any of the introductions that are
published in most
versions of the Bible. If not, then he should do so, because most of
these introductions
unapologetically admit to a bias for the traditional view that the
Bible is the "inspired
word of God." The "foreword" to the NASV says, "The New American
Standard Bible has been
produced with the conviction that the words of Scripture as originally
penned in the Hebrew
and Greek were inspired by God. Since they are the eternal Word of God,
the Holy Scriptures
speak with fresh power to each generation, to give wisdom that leads to
salvation, that men
may serve Christ to the glory of God." The preface to the NKJV says,
"In faithfulness to God
and to our readers, it was deemed appropriate that all participating
scholars sign a statement
affirming their belief in the verbal and plenary inspiration of
Scripture, and in the
inerrancy of the original autographs." The preface to the RSV says,
"The Bible is more than a
historical document to be preserved. And it is more than a classic of
English literature to
be cherished and admired. It is a record of God's dealings with men, of
God's revelation of
Himself and His will. It records the life and work of Him in whom the
Word of God became
flesh and dwelt among men.... It is our hope and our earnest prayer
that this Revised
Standard Version of the Bible may be used by God to speak to men in
these momentous times,
and to help them to understand and believe and obey His Word." The
preface to the NIV says,
"From the beginning of the project, the Committee on Bible Translation
held to certain goals
for the New International Version: that it would be an accurate
translation and one that
would have clarity and literary quality and so prove suitable for
public and private reading,
teaching, preaching, memorizing and liturgical use.... In working
toward these goals, the
translators were united in their commitment to the authority and
infallibility of the Bible
as God's Word in written form. They believe that it contains the divine
answer to the
deepest needs of humanity, that it sheds unique light on our path in a
dark world, and that
it sets forth the way to our eternal well-being."
I could continue by quoting the prefaces of other versions, but these are sufficient to show that Turkel's claim that "we" know not "a single thing" about the "motives and directions " of the "teams of scholars" who produced the various English translations is wrong. If their own statements are to be trusted, they were "scholars" who approached their task with the assumption that they were translating the "inspired word of God." In quoting their translations of Hosea 1:4, then, I have not relied on the works of people who were committed to ridiculing or destroying the Bible but on the conclusions of people who translated this verse with the understanding that it was a part of the verbally inspired word of God. If Turkel wants to challenge their decision, he will be found challenging the opinion of scholars of "all stripes," but that will be nothing unusual. I have found that biblicists will challenge anyone and everyone who in any way dares even to suggest that there may be mistakes or discrepancies in the Bible.
[Addendum July 2005: I have looked through both "Jehu: Black Hat or White Hat?" and a second part, which Turkel wrote presumably to answer my part of this debate, but I didn't see him try to address what I pointed out above about those who worked as translators of the various English versions of the Bible. If they were firm believers that the Bible is "the word of God" and in some cases even had to sign pledges that they were believers in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how can Turkel deny that their translations of Hosea 1:4, which all agree in substance, reflected what they honestly believed was the equivalent meaning in English of the original Hebrew text?]
Turkel:
it should be recognized that commentaries as a rule provide much more
in-depth information
than mere translations, and are the products of a generally higher rank
of scholarship and
of much more in-depth study and analysis than the translations are. If
it comes down to a
battle royale between the two, commentaries should assuredly be given
preference.
Till:
I'd be interested to know how Turkel decided that the word "battle" is
feminine, which he
implied by using the affected French feminine form of "royal." His
affection aside, I'd like
to see him present some reasonable evidence that commentaries "as a
rule" are the "products
of a generally higher rank of scholarship and of much more in-depth
study and analysis than
the translations are." How does he know this? Has he never read the
introductions to
various versions of the Bible, which describe the meticulous tasks of
the translators in
their consultations to decide on the most likely meanings of disputed
words and expressions?
Is he unaware that commentaries usually reflect the theological views
of the individuals who
wrote them? Find a commentary written by conservatives, and you will
invariably find a
commentary that is traditional in its approach to biblical
hermeneutics. Find a commentary
written by liberal theologians, and you will almost always find a
commentary that puts
scholarship above religious tradition. If Turkel doesn't know this
elementary fact, I have
to wonder just what planet he has been living on.
[Addendum July 2005: Basically, I am putting these internet exchanges between Turkel and me together with only minor revisions, but when they were being posted on the old alt.bible.errancy forum, some of the members would post comments now and then. I found some comments posted by Henry Neufeld on September 5, 1998, to be particularly insightful, so I am going to insert them here.
A couple of comments in this message were sufficient to draw me temporarily out of lurking. Because of the length of the message to which I'm responding, I'm going to snip everything other than those passages.
[Great big snip]
What Neufeld snipped here was Turkel's statement immediately above in which he said that commentaries contain a "higher rank of scholarship" and "much more in-depth study and analysis than the translations." Then he replied to this assertion.
I think the notion that commentaries "are the products of a generally higher rank of scholarship" than translations is one of the more ridiculous notions I've seen. In general, the standards applied to commentaries are more partisan and less consensus oriented than are those for translations, and the quality of scholarship that goes into major translations is generally of equal caliber to that which goes into commentaries. In many cases the quality of scholarship in commentaries is of lower quality.
This is especially true of major translations such as the Revised English Bible or the New Revised Standard Version, which have included some interfaith participation. The translators of Bible versions generally work toward the goal of presenting the text as clearly as possible in the receptor language; the translation accompanying a commentary quite commonly represents either an individual or a partisan viewpoint. There are very few commentaries which represent the breadth and ideological diversity of the NRSV and REB committees.
There are exceptions to this rule in the case of denominational translations, and one can detect a narrower bias in such translations as the New King James Version, New merican Standard Bible or New International Version.
[Another big snip]
Turkel:
(Naturally, depth does not equal accuracy; but we should certainly be
prepared to offer better arguments in reply to such detail-work than we
would to
lesser-detailed work. As it is, noting our next entry, "better
arguments" from Till
seems [sic] quite unlikely.
Till:
It's nice of Turkel to recognize that "depth does not equal accuracy."
Now if he could only
realize that one who quotes "in-depth" commentaries should also be
prepared to give his
readers at least enough details to make informed judgments about
whether the "in-depth"
conclusions of biblical commentaries are tenable, he would make some
real progress in his
quest for fame as a biblical "apologist," but so far we have seen no
indication of any such
awareness. He seems to think that he can sustain a position by simply
noting that Coogan or
Provan or McCominsky agrees with him. This is argumentation?
Turkel:
2) Till also suggests that my commentators are "actually believers in
biblical inspiration"
who "are looking for a way to plug a big hole in the traditional claim
that the Bible is a
work of perfect harmony." Such charges are the province of those who
have not the
wherewithal to search for their own answers:
Till:
I have to wonder if Turkel is unaware that Bible commentaries are
generally the works of
people who believe that the Bible in at least some sense is the "word
of God," just as Bible
translations are generally the works of those with the same belief. If
so, then, as I said
above, I have to wonder what planet Turkel has been living on. The fact
is that so-called
biblical scholars are for the most part Christians of at least "some
stripe." We can
therefore expect in their works the same kind of objectivity that we
would encounter in
books written by Muslim or Mormon scholars.
[Addendum July 2005: As I showed in "Commentators of All Stripes," my research after Turkel and I had completed this debate revealed that his commentators of all stripes were really fundamentalist sources intent on defending the traditional view that the Bible is the "word of God."]
Turkel
While accusations of conspiracy are polemically viable (viz. the works
of Robert Price),
and manage to provide an answer without the drudgery of actual
research, they deserve very
little attention, other than to point out that this is exactly the sort
of tactic I noted
was typical of Till in AJINOD Chapter 1:
Till:
It's always amusing when an apologetic "want-to-be" resorts to logical
fallacy in an effort
to show fallacy in the works of those he opposes. He makes an ad
hominem assault on
Robert Price and me in a pathetically weak attempt to hide the same
flaw in his own writing
that he claims to see in what Price and I have written, i. e.,
providing answers
"without the drudgery of actual research." Maybe Turkel just doesn't
understand that
stringing together quotations from commentaries, which he probably
found by using
computerized search modes, in agreement with his position hardly
constitutes "the drudgery
of actual research." One could take just about any position on
Christianity or even Islam
or Mormonism and by use of the same methods of "research" compile
strings of fragmented
quotations from an array of "scholars" and thereby "prove" that this
position is undoubtedly
true.
[Addendum July 2005: The
comic strip
for June 6, 2005,
was too appropriate to go unmentioned here. Danae announced that she
wanted to be a preconceptual scientist when she grew up. When asked
what a preconceptual scientist was,
she explained, "It's the new science of reaching a conclusion before
doing research, and then simply dismissing anything contrary to your
preconceived notions." When her horse said, "That's got to be the
dumbest thing I ever heard," she said, "Dismissed!" The description
fits Turkel perfectly. He's a preconceptual scientist..]
Turkel:
When arguments fail, polemic will substitute.
Till:
Isn't that the truth, and anyone who doubts it needs only to read
Turkel's "polemics" to see
the process at work. He is still so intellectually immature that he
just can't see that
quoting books does not constitute logical argumentation.
Turkel:
That said, let it be clarified
Till:
Okay, "let it be clarified."
Turkel:
(as if it were really needed by anyone other than Till) that my
"commentators" run the
spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal. All three groups,
when seeking
resolutions to apparent problems, are really doing no more than any
responsible historian
(outside of the radical and presumptuous critical school) is doing,
which is seeking first
to resolve a given difficulty before assuming some error on the part of
the source
material.
Till:
See how Turkel labels those who would disagree with his assumption that
the Bible is the
"word of God"? If they say anything that disputes this view, they are
"radical and
presumptuous." Anyway, I have already addressed this "argument" and
shown that
conservative-moderate-liberal agreement on a point of controversy in no
way establishes the
truth of that agreement. As I showed, one can find
conservative-moderate-liberal agreement
on different biblical issues, but that doesn't necessarily establish
the truth of whatever it
is that they agree on. If conservative-moderate-liberal agreement could
be found on matters
of controversy concerning disputed points in Islam or Mormonism, would
Turkel see this as
proof that whatever the three schools agreed on must be true? He just
can't seem to
understand that quoting "scholars" cannot serve as a substitute for
logical argumentation,
and we see very little logical argumentation in Turkel's writings.
Turkel:
They also have different solutions: Some of the liberal bent suggest a
type of progressive
revelation, in which God has set higher standards of action in Hosea's
time than were set
in Jehu's time, in response to the human need for growth. [see
AndFree.Hos, 178; Crai.12P,
12; for reply, see Irv.ThrJez, 499].
Till:
Yes, why don't we just "see" what "AndFree" and "Crai.12P" have to say
about this, as if we
have nothing to do but spend our time looking for these sources that
Turkel slings at us
throughout his articles. This approach to argumentation works on the
assumption that
"references" like this scattered throughout an article looks
impressive, but it provides
no real support for Turkel's position. If he thinks there is any merit
in what these works
have to say on the subject, then he should present the evidence that
they used to arrive at
their conclusions, but Turkel doesn't do this. Why he doesn't is no
mystery. He posts his
stuff on a website that will be read primarily by those who are already
committed to his view
of the Bible, and so he knows that most of them will just gullibly
think that such as this
looks "scholarly" and go on without ever consulting the sources to see
what they had to say
on the subject. In the first place, Turkel knows that most of his
readers wouldn't be able
to find these sources even if they tried, but, gee, it sure looks
impressive, doesn't it?
Those who use this method of "argumentation," regardless of which side
they may be on, are
actually saying to their readers, "Do my work for me, because I'm not
going to take the time
to look all of this information up myself and quote it in support of my
position. You'll
have to do all of the research."
[Addendum July 2005: At this point, Neufeld resumed his comments on Turkel's claims above that his commentators "run the spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal," and so his position on Hosea 1:4 must be right. Neufeld took the time, as I did too, to look at what "commentators of all stripes" say about this verse, and he... well, I'll just let Neufeld speak for himself (in blue print below).
It was primarily this exchange which brought me out of lurking to comment.
It appears to me that Mr. Turkel has a rather skewed version of what constitutes a "broad spectrum" of Biblical scholarship. This is indicated when he describes progressive revelation as a doctrine of liberals, and talks about leaving those Biblical scholars who are "of the radical and presumptuous critical school." One of the key features of liberal, and even moderate Biblical scholarship is use of the historical-critical methodologies. I know from experience that appeal to these methodologies results in name calling by many conservatives. Having clipped off most of liberal and moderate Biblical scholarship by labelling it as "radical and presumptuous," Mr. Turkel then labels those who believe in progressive revelation as the new "liberal wing." I learned progressive revelation from professors at the Seventh-day Adventist Schools I attended, and those who taught it were certainly not liberals.
(As an aside, I don't believe I have ever heard the doctrine of progressive revelation so stretched as to cover changing an event from "commanded and commended by God" to "punishable by death" in less than 100 years. Reading the attitude of later prophets toward the punishment of wrongdoing would also suggest that regressive revelation must have set in immediately following Hosea's statement as well.)
Since there was so little data available in Mr. Turkel's material I decided to do a quick survey of the commentaries available to me.
There is really no doubt about the translation of the passage. Whatever Semitic nuances Mr. Turkel finds would appear to be illusory. I would be interested in finding out the names and credentials of commentators who support the notion that the house of Jehu would be punished in the same way as the house of Ahab. I do read Hebrew (MA Biblical Languages). Though I don't set myself up as a final arbitrator of Hebrew usage, and always check myself against other sources, I cannot conceive of how the Hebrew in this verse could be understood in that way. This may be why every translation I have been able to consult, other than the New World Translation which is ambiguous and would receive bad marks as a student exercise on this verse, reads essentially the same way on this particular issue. The house of Jehu is to be punished for bloody deeds at Jezreel.
There are essentially three approaches to understanding the verse:
1. Conservative attempts to harmonize.
These go one of two ways. Either they say that the bloody deeds of/in Jezreel do not refer to Jehu's action against Ahab, but rather to unspecified deeds committed by Jehu's dynasty or they describe Jehu as acting for improper reasons and thus eventually meriting punishment for what is a good deed.
Commentators that I found to support the first option included Adam Clarke, Jamieson/Fausett/Brown. (I am citing Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke and Jamieson/Fausett/Brown from the Bethany Bible Commentary on the Old Testament.)
Commentators that I found supporting the second option included Matthew Henry, the more modern Asbury Bible Commentary and the Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary. None provided any Biblical reference to support the notion that Hosea was concerned with motivation rather than the deed itself.
2. Moderate commentators supporting a moderate blending.
This view was represented by the Anchor Bible commentary on Hosea (Andersen, Francis I. & David Noel Freedman. The Anchor Bible, Vol 24: Hosea. NY: Doubleday, 1980.) In a rather lengthy discussion they argue that it was unlikely that such a shift in perspective of the prophetic school could occur in the short period of time involved, so that we must, in fact, be dealing with a continuation of bloody deeds other than the specific incident during Jehu's coup. They argue that Hosea is looking back at the evils of Jehu's dynasty and seeing him as continuing the tradition of evil of his predecessors and thus worthy of the same punishment. (I may be doing injustice to their argument which is several pages in length concerning just this one point. Most good libraries have a copy of at least many of the Anchor Bible volumes, however, so it should be easy to check me on this.)
3. Liberal scholars who see Hosea with a separate point of view.
This is illustrated by James Luther Mays (Hosea: A Commentary. Westminster Press, 1969; in the Old Testament Library) p. 28: "Hosea stands in a tradition which has a different view of kingship and another evaluation of Jehu's 'reform'." (Making reference to 2 Kings 10:30) This view is shared by the Interpreter's Bible. I personally favor this view as well, FWIW.
Base on this I would say it is not correct to claim any broad consensus of Biblical scholarship in favor of a particular solution to this passage. In fact, there are a variety of solutions, and few of them come with much in the way of argumentation or support. I would suggest that proving a broad consensus of Biblical scholarship is valuable in discussion, though it doesn't prove the truth of a solution. But such a consensus must truly include a broad range of ideological.
What impressed me about Neufeld's comments on this debate is that he, unlike Turkel, didn't just cite commentators but summarized their positions so that readers could have a basis to decide whether to agree or disagree with them. As I said above, I too checked Turkel's "commentators of all stripes" and found them not to "run the spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal," as Turkel claimed, but to consist primarily of commentators with moderate and liberal views. The conservative/inerrant position was conspicuous by its most of the commentaries of Turkel's "sources."]
Turkel:
Others remain content with seeing contradiction (but seldom offer any
detailed work on the
subject--
Till:
Just as someone named Turkel does so often, i. e., "seldom
offer[s] any detailed work"
to support his position?
[Addendum July 2005: As Neufeld's comments in blue above show, detailed works that dispute Turkel's position have indeed been "offered."]
Turkel:
see Wolf.Hos, 17-18; May.Hos, 28; Jone.12K, 2/473].
Till:
Well, sure, I'll drop everything I'm doing right now and get down to
finding these sources
and reading everything they had to say on the matter. Is this Turkel a
real person?
[Addendum July 2005: If Turkel wants us to "see" Wolf [sic] & May, he should take a cue from Neufeld and tell us what Wolf [sic] and May said that is so relevant to this discussion. I suspect that Turkel knew that they didn't say anything significant but quoted them just to impress his choir members, who would probably say, "Hey, look at our man citing sources; he must be right!"
As I showed in this section of "Commentators of All stripes," Wolff thought that Hosea meant to condemn Jehu's massacre at Jezreel. I quoted at length his opinion, which ended with this statement.
With respect to these questions [about Hosea's intentions], only two things seem at once to be clear: (1) The bloodguilt resulting from this political struggle for power provokes Yahweh's judgment; (2) according to v 4, Hosea assesses Jehu's revolution otherwise than did the prophetic circles gathered around Elijah and Elisha (2 Kings 10:30).
If Turkel really did read Wolff's commentary on Hosea 1:4 and then try to present him as a commentator who supported Turkel's view, then he flagrantly misrepresented Wolff to his readers. I suspect, however, that Turkel never really read Wolff but only saw him cited as a secondary source in the commentaries of McCominsky and Stuart and wrongly concluded that Wolff was an advocate of this view of Hosea 1:4 that had not been discovered until 5-7 years ago.
And Turkel has the gall to accuse me of "superficial" methodology.]
Turkel:
Irvine [Irv.ThrJez, 503] suggests that our 2 Kings passage (10:30-1) is
a piece of
imperial propaganda that was being refuted by Hosea, which would raise
the question of
interpolation in 2 Kings or its sources.
Till:
Then can we assume from this that "commentators of all stripes" don't
agree that there was
unity in the views of Hosea and the author(s) of 2 Kings? At any rate,
the statement above
is a good example of the type of ambiguity that we see in Turkel's
writings parading around
under the claim of "in-depth" scholarship. This "Irvine" whom Turkel
quotes has presented
a view that would conflict with the inerrancy position, but even though
he took a position
unfavorable to biblical inerrancy, I really don't know whether to agree
with Irvine or not,
because Turkel doesn't give enough information to enable me to know if
this opinion of
2
Kings 10:30-31 is tenable.
How then can he expect me to accept the fragmented quotations that he
cites from
commentaries that support the inerrancy view of the scriptures?
Turkel:
Of course, regarding those of "all stripes" who do seek to resolve the
issue--if Till wishes
to assert some harmonic conspiracy at work, that is his prerogative.
Till:
I see no need to assert that there is any such conspiracy, because, as
I have shown, I'm
intelligent enough to know that conservative-moderate-liberal agreement
on a particular
point of theology doesn't automatically prove that the point is true.
Turkel apparently
can't see this. He apparently can't see either that commentaries,
whether conservative,
moderate, or liberal, are written to appeal to those who believe that
the Bible is in some
sense the word of God, so one would reasonably expect to find views in
commentaries that
support this belief.
Turkel:
It is certainly much easier for him than taking the time to absorb the
requisite knowledge
and make his own, qualified assessment of the matter, and slightly
easier than engaging in
the drudgework of seeking an answer in properly and better--informed
sources.
Till:
Of course, we are supposed to believe that Turkel has put in long hours
of "drudgework" on
this particular point so that he could "absorb the requisite knowledge"
to understand that
no problem exists between 2 Kings
10:30 and Hosea 1:4,
when
the only evidence of "drudgework" we can see in his "apologetic"
efforts is that he has
strung together fragmented quotations from various commentaries and
saved them in computer
files that he can tap into whenever he wishes to give the impression of
"in-depth" research.
In all likelihood, much of what he quotes when he inserts bracketed
references like "[see
AndFree.Hos, 178; Crai.12P, 12; for reply, see Irv.ThrJez, 499]" are
secondhanded citations
that he saw in articles or books he was looking through and then copied
them into his
articles. I spent 30 years dealing with this kind of superficial
"research" in college
essays. The chances that Turkel has read even significant sections of
the sources that he
quotes are slight to next to none, but such "apologetic" antics as this
are nothing new to
those who have had experience with his type of "apologetics." On the
Errancy list, we saw this kind of
"argumentation" most
recently from David Conklin, who when he was pressed to tell us more
specifically what the
sources he had strung together had said couldn't tell us. When the
pressure to put up or
shut up intensified, he withdrew from the list, in all probability to
save face. I can't
help suspecting that we are seeing the same type of "scholarship" from
Turkel, who if also
pressed to tell us more exactly what Coogan or Craig or Freeman or such
like said about
whatever issue they were called upon to settle couldn't do it any more
than Conklin could.
Conklin like Turkel constantly talked about the range and depth of his
research and chided
members of the list for the shallowness of their research, but when it
came time for him
to prove the depth of his research, he couldn't produce the evidence. I
may be wrong, but
I suspect that in Turkel we have only another Conklin, whose research
has been no deeper
than a sidewalk puddle after a summer shower.
Turkel:
We of a more serious bent may feel free to ignore such paranoid
shenanigans and seek rather
for a resolution of the issue.
Till:
If this is true, then why haven't we seen less talk about Turkel's
"serious bent,"
"entitlement to independent thinking," and "in-depth research" and more
efforts to show us
"a resolution of the issue." The fact is that Turkel has done very
little so far except to
assert that I am shoddy and incompetent in my methods as if he thinks
that saying this
enough times may convince some to think that it is so.
I haven't had much to do yet, because Turkel hasn't really given me much to refute, but I urge everyone to stick around, because I have reached a point in his article where he actually tried to present an argument, in this case about what paqad meant in Hebrew. The fun is about to begin, as I show how flimsy his case is and how "shallow" his research has been.
[Addendum July 2005: Despite all his talk about "we of a more serious bent," Turkel well knows that he actually has the inerrantist bent that I quoted from the introduction to Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties in "Commentators of All Stripes," where Archer gave the following advice to Bible believers bothered by claims of errancy in the Bible.
Be fully persuaded in your own mind that an adequate explanation exists, even though you have not yet found it
Turkel knows that he always approaches claims of discrepancy in the Bible with a preconceived view that it isn't really a discrepancy. He claims to have written over 1200 articles on his website, but I have yet to find one in which he said, "Yep, this is a discrepancy all right." Instead, he twists himself into all sorts of verbal contortions to try to show that it isn't an error. On the other hand, I do not assume automatically that an alleged discrepancy is an actual discrepancy, and I have butted heads many times with superficial skeptics who have tried to find biblical discrepancies where they don't really exist. The most notable disagreement that I have had with biblical skeptics occurred when I took issue with Dennis McKinsey because of his tendency to claim biblical errors where there were none. That rift occurred four years ago and still hasn't healed, because he and I simply cannot agree on the methodology for identifying biblical errors.
My record will show that I feel perfectly free to tell overzealous skeptics that they are claiming errors where none exist. Hence, I will not hesitate to say, "I don't think that this is a legitimate discrepancy," but when has Turkel ever said, "Yes, this is definitely a biblical error." He just doesn't do that. He will go to just about any extreme to try to find a way to make a discrepancy not be a discrepancy. He knows that if he should ever take the position that discrepancies are in the Bible, he will risk cutting off some of the flow of PayPal money coming into his website.
The last thing that Turkel can legitimately say about himself is that he is "independent minded" or that he has a "serious bent" about biblical studies. When he says such as this, he has to know that it isn't so.]
Turkel:
To begin, now, with the answer for the a) visit/punish
problem. Here we
will give the floor to McComiskey's detailed exegesis [MCom.MP, 20n;
see also MCom.PrIron
and Garr.HosJoe, 57], which argues that the word "paqad" here
"establishes a relationship
expressing supreme irony." Places where Hebrew characters appear in the
text are represented
with material in ():
(Paqad) is difficult to define.
Till:
And so are other words and expressions in foreign languages that don't
have their exact
counterparts in other languages; however, that does not mean that the
sense of the words
cannot be conveyed in other languages. Translators simply use
definitional expressions when
they encounter such terms.
Turkel [still quoting
McComiskey]:
It frequently describes an action that precedes the bestowal of
blessing (Gen. 21:1, 50:24-5,
Exod. 3:16) or the execution of judgment (Ex. 32:34, 1 Sam. 15:2, Is.
23:7) on the part of
God. Since the word may precede an act of blessing, it cannot denote
the sole idea of
punishment. It is best to understand it as attending to or giving heed
to a person, object
or situation before responding.
Till:
Yes, and I have already discussed this aspect of the word in an earlier
part of my reply to
Turkel. To refresh his memory, this is what I said about how PQD
was used in
Hebrew.
I am not going to play the game of my-scholars-against-your-scholars, and so I am just going to say at this point that my research into pqd, when it was used in a sense most often translated as "visit" or "punish," showed that the word has no exact parallel in English but that it connoted the idea of "remembering" in either a positive or a negative sense. That a word in one language may not have an exact parallel in another doesn't mean that the sense or meaning of the word cannot be translated into another language. I think immediately of the word chez in French. If one should say in French, "Je suis chez mon frere," he would mean that he is at his brother's home or house, even though the word home or house is not actually in the sentence he used. To translate this sentence as, "I am at my brother's house" would be an accurate representation of what the speaker meant. To say that an accurate translation of pqd in Hebrew isn't possible would be a strange position for a biblicist to take, because he would be arguing that his god inspired the writing of the Bible in a language that cannot be deciphered.
As I mentioned above, in its sense of "visit," the word pqd denoted the idea of "remembering," but whether the "remembering" was positive or negative could be determined by context. If an English speaker should encounter an insult or a spiteful deed from someone, he might say, "Okay, I'll remember that." The statement would carry the sense of a threat or payback, which anyone fluent in English would understand. On the other hand, if a good deed were done to a person, he might also say, "I'll remember this," but here he would be speaking in a positive or favorable sense. The idea of a payback would be understood in the statement, but the person it was said to would understand that it was a promise to return the favor when the opportunity presented itself. No one fluent in English would experience any problems understanding what was meant in either situation, so it is reasonable to assume that the same would be true of pqd in Hebrew. The contexts would clarify meaning. Here are some statements where PQD was translated "visit" in the KJV but used in obviously positive or favorable senses.
So didn't I say exactly what McComiskey stated above? I even went on to give examples from the Old Testament to show how the context in which PQD was used enabled readers to determine whether the word conveyed a positive (favorable) or negative (punitive) sense. Here are some examples in which the word had obvious positive connotations.
Genesis 50:24 And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit [PQD] you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 25 And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit [PQD] you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence.
Exodus 13:19 And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit [PQD] you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.
Genesis 21:1 And Yahweh visited [PQD] Sarah as he had said, and Yahweh did unto Sarah as he had spoken. 2 For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.
Exodus 3:15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. 16 Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited [PQD] you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt.
I followed these examples with passages in which the context clearly showed when the word PQD was used to connote negative or punitive meaning. I won't quote them here, but anyone can go back and find these examples.
Turkel [still quoting
McComiskey]:
This concept of mental apprehension is apparent in the frequent
association of the word with
(remember, see, e.g., Jer. 14:10).
Till:
Yes, isn't this what I said in my comments on PQD that I have
quoted above?
Turkel [still quoting
McComiskey]:
There are many other nuances, but in contexts of judgment it describes
an action in which
God attends to the wrong he observes by intervening with appropriate
action.
Till:
This is exactly what I said earlier in my reply, in the section that I
quoted above, which
anyone can check to see. I also pointed out how that there was always a
contextual pattern
in the use of PQD to enable readers to determine whether it was
being used to denote
positive (favorable) or negative (punitive) intention, so there is
nothing at all unusual
about this. As I also noted, languages have homographs (different words
that are spelled
alike but have different meanings), and so the contexts in which
homographs are used always
enable those who speak these languages to determine what was meant.
Turkel wasted a lot of
time talking about nothing that's at all unusual.
Turkel [still quoting
McComiskey]:
When (paqad) is collocated with (upon) as well as a direct object and
an indirect object (as
it is here) in statements of judgment, the direct object is viewed as
attending the indirect
object. That is, the direct object is brought into the experience of
the indirect object.
Till:
It's sort of amusing that those who want to talk about "nuances" in
Hebrew don't seem to
understand even elementary points of grammar. All the way through his
explication of
paqad, McComiskey confuses indirect objects with objects of
prepositions and refers
to indirect objects in sentences where the structure is really that of
prepositions and
their objects. An indirect object names the receiver of a direct object
as in, "I gave him
five dollars." Five dollars is the direct object of gave, and him
is the
receiver of the direct object, hence the indirect object. However, if
the sentence said,
"I gave five dollars to him," although the sense or meaning would be
the same, him is
now the object of the preposition to and not an indirect
object. McComiskey speaks of
the direct object as "attending" the indirect object or being "brought
into the experience of
the indirect object," but that's a rather imprecise way of defining
"indirect object." An
indirect object, as I explained, simply identifies the receiver of the
direct object. Let's
suppose that we had the following sentences:
In the first one, them is an indirect object, which denotes who will receive the plague (the direct object). In the second one, them is the object of the preposition upon. The meanings are the same, but if one is going to speak about "nuances" in an ancient, dead language, he should at least demonstrate that he understands basic grammatical principles. The third sentence states not just the recipient of the punishment but also the reason for the punishment, i. e., their sins and iniquities.
[Addendum July 2005: Turkel attempted to reply to this in "Jehu: Black Hat or White Hat?", and his "reply" was just about what we would have expected: Till, er, Skeptic X used English grammar in his "lecture."
Skeptic X goes on to give us a lecture in English grammar - assuming that the English versions of our verse and assuming that the English grammar corresponds with the Hebrew grammar precisely. He does not analyze the Hebrew grammar or show how McComiskey has allegedly "confused" anything; he merely throws a few English rules into the mix and assumes that the job is done! Just the answer we would expect from a neophyte out of his range! To complain about someone not understanding "basic grammatical principles" without failing to comprehend that those principles often vary in nuances from one language to the next (indeed, often vary significantly!) is not just ignorance - it's chauvinism!
Certainly, grammatical principles will have their individual singularities in different languages, but Turkel is apparently so linguistically ignorant that he doesn't know that a verb is a verb, a noun is a noun, a pronoun is a pronoun, etc. regardless of what language they are in. The same is true of prepositions and indirect objects, but before I say anything else about this, let's look at the asininity of the rest of Turkel's "rebuttal" statement.
At any rate, from here Skeptic X employs his usual predictable conspiracy shebang, saying that our scholar McComiskey's work was merely "an effort to find some way out of the problem that the text in Hosea poses to biblical inerrancy" (again, quite a convenient substitute for actually dealing with the data, and a fair admission that the argument has indeed been lost - and how do we know and have no less proof that the liberals and skeptics aren't the ones who have been pushing a conspiracy...?); an attempt to find parallel in other verses, Exodus 34:6 [sic] and Deuteronomy 5:9 (Skeptic X is looking only at paqad 'al, "visit upon" - he needs to look for paqad 'dam 'al, "visit blood upon" - he won't find it) - and more, more charges of conspiracy.
I have made a "fair admission that the argument has indeed been lost"? In Turkel's dreams! He said that I need to look for paqad 'dam 'al [visit blood upon] in Hosea 1:4, but that I won't find it. Well, I hate to disappoint him, but to find "visit blood upon," all anyone has to do is look at Hosea 1:4, because they are right there in plain view, and anyone who knows even a smattering of Hebrew can easily find them. I now have a Hebrew text opened to Hosea 1 in front of me as I write this, and it clearly says, "For yet a little [while] I will visit [paqad] the blood [dam] of Jezreel upon ['al] the house of Jehu." If Turkel didn't know that paqad dam 'al, all three words, are in this verse, he is certainly not expert enough in Hebrew to talk about "nuances" in this language or anything else pertaining to it. The Hebrew text shows that paqad is used with the first person singular ending [yod] and the waw conjunctive [and] prefixed. This is followed by dam [blood], which is separated from the preposition al, inseparably prefixed to house [bayith], by Jezreel [yizree'l]. All of this is in the Hebrew text, so if Turkel can look at a Hebrew text and not see it, he should cease bragging about what he knows about Hebrew "nuances" and the "Semitic mind."
But let us now give an answer directly to the question asked of whether there is some "nuance" about Hebrew that Skeptic X is missing that I can inform him of. Yes [sic] there is - and it has to do with the way prepositions in Hebrew can work, in particular the one in Hosea 1:4. There is an explanation here, and it does not require a great deal of knowledge of Hebrew; in fact, what I am about to explain may be found in standard Hebrew grammars. Skeptic X apparently means in his explanation about grammar above that Mccomiskey is calling the object of the preposition in the phrase, "upon the house of Jehu" -- "upon" being the preposition, and "house" being the object of the preposition -- an indirect object. No, sez: "house" is an object of a preposition. McComiskey is a fraud. Case closed. But is it?
What Skeptic X does not know about [sic] is this: the words in the phrase "upon the house of," in Hebrew, operate as a grammatical unity. Thus, "upon the house of" is treated as one word; thus, for Skeptic X to refer to an "object of the preposition" here is hopelessly anachronistic in context. There is no confusion of the "object of the preposition" with the "indirect object" because the preposition has been "absorbed" into the word following, and thereby becomes part of its grammatical identity - in this case, an indirect object. We now see why it is that Skeptic X thinks (wrongly) that McComiskey has confused an object of a preposition for an indirect object.
Such linguistic ignorance as this is why Turkel needs to stop trying to pass himself off as an expert in Hebrew language and "nuances." Many prepositions in Hebrew are, as Turkel simplistically stated, prefixed to their objects, but they are still prepositions, and their objects are still objects. Beth [in, with, or by], kaph [as, like,, or according to], and lamed [to, at, for, or towards] are inseparable prepositions, because they are always prefixed to their objects. Other prepositions, too many to list, are independent, because they always appear as separate words, and still other prepositions are sometimes used independently and sometimes inseparably. al [ayin, lamed] is one of those prepositions, and it is the one used in Hosea 1:4 with bayith [of Jehu]. Here it was prefixed to its object, but its inseparable use here did not keep it from being a preposition. As such, it had an object, and that object was bayith [house.]
Turkel seems not to understand that grammatical concepts are grammatical concepts, whether applied to English, French, Greek, Hebrew, or whatever. If Turkel would enroll in a foreign language class or even in a Hebrew class, he would hear his instructor using grammatical concepts like noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and, yes, prepositions to explain the grammar of the language. I still have the textbook that I used in a French course for foreigners at the Sorbonne in 1955, and it has sections about "L'Article" [the article], "Le Nom" [the noun], "Le Prenom" [the pronoun], "L'Adjective" [the adjective], "L'Adverbe" [the adverb], "Le Verbe" [the verb], and so on, all of which have their parallels in English. I also have the textbook that I used in college Hebrew, and it has sections on "the article," "the inseparable preposition," "the preposition [meym waw]," "the conjunction," "independent personal pronouns," "the verb," and so on. Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, verbs--these are all grammatical concepts that exist in English and other languages, so using what is known in one's native language to explain the same grammatical concepts in other languages is perfectly legitimate. If one knows what a noun or a verb is in English, he can use this to understand the usage of nouns and verbs in other languages. By raging against my use of these concepts to discuss a point in Hebrew simply shows Turkel's linguistic ignorance.
The inseparable usage of prepositions in Hebrew was so different from what I was familiar with from my knowledge of English grammar, that it stuck with me over the years long after I had completed the college course that I took in 1952. As I explained above, this is actually a matter of semantics, because whether one says, "God will send them a plague," or whether he says, "God will send a plague upon them," the meaning is essentially the same. The antecedents of them will be the recipients of the plague, but from a grammatical point of view, it would be incorrect to say that them is the indirect object in the second sentence, because it isn't; it is the object of the preposition upon. Them is an indirect object in the first sentence but not in the second. Hence, McCominsky was incorrect in saying that "house of Jehu" was an indirect object in Hosea 1:4, because it wasn't; it was the object of the preposition al, which was inseparably prefixed to its object.
Indirect object is a misnomer that some Hebrew grammars loosely apply to prepositional phrases that begin with the inseparable preposition lamed, which has the meaning of to in English. If passages that appear to contain indirect objects in English translations are checked, they invariably turn out to be prepositional phrases. In the Garden-of-Eden myth, for example, Yahweh asked Eve, "Who told you that you were naked?" In the English translation you is an indirect object of told and that you were naked is a noun clause serving as the direct object of told, but in Hebrew, it literally reads, "Who told to you that you were naked?" The preposition lamed [to] is inseparably prefixed to the second person singular pronoun, so this is actually a prepositional phrase. Some biblical grammarians will recognize this distinction, as did Allen Ross, Th. D., Ph. D., of Cambridge University, in commenting on Jonah 1:8 in "Exegetical Assignments."
“So they said to him, “Tell us, [you] on whose account this storm [has come] upon us, what is your mission, and from where do you come; what is your land, and from what people are you?”
The English makes “us” look like an object of the verb, at least an indirect object in our language. In Hebrew it is the object of the preposition, “tell to us,” and so a genitive.
As I noted above, however, this is really a matter of semantics, because if Hebrew had used an indirect object in Hosea 1:4, it would have conveyed the same meaning as the prepositional phrase "upon the house of Jehu," so the important thing is that this verse clearly says, as noted in 36 different translations, that Yahweh was going to punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel. McCominsky, Stuart, Turkel, and Glenn Miller have to twist themselves into verbal contortions to try to make this passage not mean what it clearly says--and what the hundreds of Hebrew scholars who worked on the 36 quoted translations obviously recognized that it meant.]
He then writes: The collocation (visit upon) cannot denote punishment "for" in this context. The nation will not be punished "for" these destroyers, but "by" them. The direct object (the four destroyers) is to come into the experience of the indirect object (the nation as the object of the preposition upon).
Till:
A written statement contains only the information that the writer puts
into it. If there is
no reason given for the sending of the "destroyers" in Jeremiah 15:3,
it is because the
writer didn't state the reason. If, however, the writer had said, "I
will [paqad]
four kinds of destroyers against them for their sins and iniquities:
the sword to kill,
the dogs to drag away, and the birds of the air and the beasts of the
earth to devour and
destroy," then the statement would contain the reason for the sending
of the destroyers, so
McComiskey is laboring to explain away the problem in
Hosea
1:4, which gave the reason
for the visit [paqad] by trying to compare it to a statement by
another writer that
was not linguistically parallel to it. Just because two statements
contain the same word
(paqad in this case) doesn't mean that they are literarily
parallel. In Hosea 1:4,
the prophet stated the reason for the impending vengeance on the house
of Jehu. Yahweh
would extract this vengeance because of the "blood of Jezreel." The
reason is specifically
stated, and so this statement cannot be compared to another statement
by another writer who
used paqad but did not state the reason why Yahweh would
"visit" or "remember" or
"send" destruction or punishment. The fact is that when
Jeremiah
15:3 is considered
in its context, we can see that the writer did state the reason
why four "destroyers"
would be sent upon the people of Judah, and the reason was (what else?)
their sins. In
chapter 14, Jeremiah cataloged the "sins" of the people of Judah:
Jeremiah 14:10 Thus says Yahweh concerning this people: Truly they have loved to wander, they have not restrained their feet; therefore Yahweh does not accept them, now he will remember [PQD] their iniquity and punish their sins. 11 Yahweh said to me: Do not pray for the welfare of this people. 12 Although they fast, I do not hear their cry, and although they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I do not accept them; but by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence I consume them.
The tirade continued throughout the chapter, after which Jeremiah told in specific details what Yahweh intended to do about the iniquity of these people.
Jeremiah 15:1 Then Yahweh said to me: Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people. Send them out of my sight, and let them go! 2 And when they say to you, "Where shall we go?" you shall say to them: Thus says Yahweh: Those destined for pestilence, to pestilence, and those destined for the sword, to the sword; those destined for famine, to famine, and those destined for captivity, to captivity. 3 And I will appoint [PQD] over them four kinds of destroyers, says Yahweh: the sword to kill, the dogs to drag away, and the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth to devour and destroy. 4 I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what King Manasseh son of Hezekiah of Judah did in Jerusalem.
So actually Jeremiah did state the reason for the sending [PQD] of the four destroyers. They were being sent because of the sins sand iniquities of the people. (After all, Yahweh is Yahweh, isn't he?) In actuality, then, there is no substantial difference in the way that PQD was used here and in Hosea 1:4 except that the verse in Jeremiah specified the kinds of punishment that Yahweh would use. For some reason Turkel thinks that I see Hosea 1:4 as a warning that Yahweh would do to the house of Jehu exactly what Jehu had done at Jezreel, and so Hosea was saying that the house of Jehu would be brutally massacred, just as Jehu brutally massacred the royal family of Israel, but I have never thought that the verse was necessarily conveying the way that Yahweh would punish the house of Jehu but only the reason why he would punish it. After all, vengeance doesn't necessarily entail payback in kind. If Smith should vandalize Doe's car, Doe could extract vengeance in many ways without doing exactly the same by vandalizing Smith's car. Doe could report to IRS a suspicion that Smith has been cheating on his income tax reports, or Doe could hire someone to beat Smith up. Any number of acts could constitute "vengeance" without resorting to the same act that Smith committed.
In my opinion, this is the situation in Hosea 1:4. The prophet claimed that Yahweh had said, "Yet a little while, and I will avenge upon the house of Jehu the blood of Jezreel." The promise is that vengeance will be extracted, the object of the vengeance would be the house of Jehu, and the reason for the vengeance was the "blood of Jezreel." If we assume the existence of McComiskey's and Turkel's primitive deity Yahweh, then Yahweh could have avenged the blood of Jezreel in any number of ways. He could have caused all living descendants of Jehu to die peacefully in their sleep or he could have brought them all together in one place (as Satan did to Job's sons and daughters, (Job 1:13-19) and sent [pqd] a tornado upon them. Either way or some other bloodless way that achieved the same results could have constituted vengeance on the house of Jehu, but the way the vengeance was carried out would not have been the same as the reason it was carried out. As far as biblical history is concerned, it recorded no massacre of Jehu's descendants. Zechariah, the fourth-generation descendant of Jehu, was assassinated by Shallum (2 Kings 15:8-12), and this ended the reign of the dynasty that Jehu began. The Bible, however, records no massacre of all of Jehu's descendants, and I can see no reason to interpret Hosea 1:4 to mean that the prophet was saying that all of the descendants of Jehu would die in a violent massacre like the one that he performed at Jezreel.
[Addendum July 2005: Turkel made no attempts, which I could find, to reply to my last point above. If, as Turkel and his "sources" claim, Hosea 1:4 meant only that the house of Jehu would be brought to an end in the same way that Jehu brought the house of Ahab to an end, i. e., by a bloody massacre of the entire lineage, then why is there no record of any such massacre having been perpetrated against the house of Jehu in Hosea's time? Jehu's house came to an end in the way that I noted above, Zechariah, the fourth generation from Jehu, was assassinated by Shallum, and that ended the dynasty begun by Jehu. The record in 2 Kings 15:8-12 mentions only the killing of Zechariah and says nothing about killing Zechariah's family or friends or associates, as was done when the houses of Jeroboam, Baasha, and Ahab were exterminated, so just where was the "blood of Jezreel," as Turkel interprets it, in the termination of the house of Jehu? Turkel whistled his way by this one, but in "Jehu: Black Hat or White Hat?" he did quote my analogy above and then try to dance around it.
Yes, Skeptic X has indeed grasped the point of our argument, though he has failed to answer it. As for that analogy, here is what we are arguing in those terms: Smith has vandalized Doe's car, all right, but Doe hired him to vandalize it because he was entering an old-fashioned demolition race and wanted to look the part! But then, Smith also went on to Doe's house and set it on fire and painted Doe's dog purple. So, since Smith is an expert in vandalizing cars for such purposes as described, Doe chooses a condemnation that Smith will grasp perfectly: "For painting my dog and burning my house, I'm gonna mess your face up, and it's gonna look just like my car does now!" That, we argue, is what Hosea is doing, in a typical ANE communication fashion: Choosing a graphic example very familiar to the subject at hand (the house of Jehu) in order to let them know what's ahead for them.]
Turkel turned my analogy into a false one by making Smith a hired vandalizer, but in the story of the massacre at Jezreel, Jehu had not been "hired"; he had been selected by Yahweh and anointed to be king. Turkel may quibble that hired or selected, what is the difference? To this, I would say that one can easily understand why Doe could not have known that Smith would exceed what he had been hired to do, but Yahweh was presumably an omniscient deity, so if Jehu exceeded the "mandate" that Yahweh had selected him to execute, why wouldn't he have known that and selected someone more dependable? We can expect Turkel to stamp his feet and scream, "Till's problem is that God wouldn't kiss his butt," but besides begging the question that God was in any way involved in all this, that kind of juvenile conduct won't explain anything. Turkel's analogy is clearly strained, for when he has one of Yahweh's specially chosen envoys exceeding his "mandate," he makes the omniscient Yahweh look like a nincompoop for having selected him. Furthermore, by extending the falseness of his analogy to try to make Smith exceed what he had been hired to do, Turkel is still clinging to his discredited claim that Jehu had exceeded his "mandate," and that was the reason why Yahweh four generations later decided to visit punishment on his descendants, who, if Jehu had indeed exceeded his "mandate," had had nothing to do with Jehu's assumed excesses. I have shown above and in Part One that Jehu did not exceed his "mandate" but that he did exactly what he had been told to do, i. e., exterminate the house of Ahab and make it like the houses of Jeroboam and Baasha by killing every male both bond and free. Instead of ceaselessly quibbling about Jehu's alleged excesses, Turkel should tell us how Jehu could have obeyed Yahweh's "mandate" if he had left alive in Ahab's house any males, either bond or free. Turkel has repeatedly quibbled that Jehu killed some who were not descendants of Ahab--and he did--but the command to kill all males either bond or free would show that a person's house in biblical times extended beyond his immediate relatives, because males who were descendants of a king of Ahab's stature would hardly have been bonded males.
On this issue, Turkel is done. Somebody stick a fork into him.]
Turkel didn't give much of the context of McComiskey's commentary, but from what he did give, it seems to me that McComiskey was comparing apples (Hosea 1:4) to oranges (Jer. 15:3) in an effort to find some way out of the problem that the text in Hosea poses to biblical inerrancy. The two texts simply are not parallel, and the stubborn fact remains that of all of the 27 [36] translations that I have in my personal library, I found none that did not translate Hosea 1:4 to indicate that Yahweh would punish or bring vengeance upon the house of Jehu because of the blood that Jehu had shed at Jezreel. McComiskey struggles to make a point based on what Hosea did not say rather than on what he said. Let's suppose that the prophet had said, "Yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu by a pestilence." In this case, we would be able to see that Hosea communicated (1) the promise of vengeance, (2) the reason for the vengeance, (3) the object of the vengeance, and (4) the mode of vengeance. The fact that Jeremiah used paqad in a sentence that did not state the reason for the vengeance (which had already been stated in earlier verses) is hardly sufficient grounds to justify McComiskey's quibbling in this matter as he looks for "nuances" that aren't there.
Turkel
[still quoting McComiskey]:
This sense of the idiom is exists [sic] in every context where
(visited upon) has two
objects. On the other hand, the translation "punish for" does not apply
in every context.
We must not assign that sense to the collocation uncritically
Till:
Well, let's see how McComiskey's claim holds up.
Here is Hosea 1:4 as literally rendered in Hendrickson's Interlinear Bible, "Yet a little [while] and I will visit the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu...." This is in agreement with Young's Literal Translation: "Yet a little, and I have charged the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu...." The word "blood" is the direct object of "visit" or "charged," and there is no indirect object that McComiskey talked about at length. "House [of Jehu]" is instead the object of the preposition "on." As I have acknowledged, my Hebrew is a bit rusty, so if I err in my analysis, I'm sure that Turkel who seems to understand all about the "nuances" of Hebrew will be able to correct me, but as I look at the text in Hebrew, I see the preposition ['al, ayin and lameth] before the word bayith (house), so this is a situation in which there is no indirect object but an object of a preposition.
My eyes, which are admittedly rusty to Hebrew, see the same construction in Hosea 4:9, "And I will visit [PQD] on them their ways and their doings...." The direct objects of paqad [visit] in this verse are "ways" and "doings," and "them" is the object of the same preposition ['al], so we see a striking linguistic parallel between this verse and Hosea 1:4. If the concept of punishing is present in 4:9, why wouldn't it be present in 1:4? The "two objects" of PQD, as McComiskey has interpreted the grammatical term "object," are present in both passages.
Exodus 20:5 and its related texts Exodus 34:7 and Deuteronomy 5:9 are also parallel in structure to the verses in Hosea. These verses warn that Yahweh is a jealous god (so what else is new?) "visiting [pqd] the iniquity of fathers on ['al] children" even to the third and fourth generations. The direct object of the verbal "visiting" is "iniquity," and the object of the preposition ['al] is "children." Hence, the verses are warning that the infinitely loving Yahweh will actually punish third- or fourth-generations of "fathers" who committed iniquity. So if Hosea said that Yahweh would visit [pqd] the blood of Jezreel on ['al] the house of Jehu, why wouldn't that carry the same sense as Yahweh's visiting [pqd] the iniquities of the fathersIf we had before us the entire text of McComiskey's commentary on Hosea 1:4, I have no doubt that we would find just another attempt to try to explain away the problem that exists between this verse and 2 Kings 10:30-31, but does anyone think that McComiskey, Turkel, or anyone else would subject a single verse to such quibbling as we have seen from them if the text in 2 Kings 10:30-31 didn't exist? Theirs is just one more effort, under the guise of "scholarship" and discovering subtle "nuances," to keep from admitting that the Bible is not the uniquely harmonious work that Turkel's hero Josh McDowell has claimed.
Turkel:
A few citations will bring home the point that this word "paqad" is a
difficult
translation to determine--which explains why (in answer to Till) so
many translations (as
well as less in-depth commentaries) continue to use it. Speiser once
remarked of "paqad"
that, "there is probably no other Hebrew verb that has caused
translators as much
trouble"--and it will take only a few citations to see why.
Till:
Well, of course, if Sp[e]iser "once remarked" this, then it must be
true. This is a good point
to remind everyone of my previous comments about homographs. All
languages have them, and
those who speak a language can determine the meaning of homographs by
the way they are used.
Whether PQD in every instance of its occurrence within the Old
Testament was always
the same word may not be true. It could be that there were merely
different words in Hebrew
that were written as PQD, just as mean, mean, and mean
or bear
and bear in English are not always the same word, even though
they are spelled and
pronounced the same. We have no difficulty determining what is meant
when we encounter such
words, because the contexts in which they are used determine meaning or
which homograph was
being used.
Note: This verse has a blessing visited upon Sarah. "Paqad" is not literally translated and emerges through the word "did."
Till:
Well, paqad may not have been literally translated in the
version Turkel has quoted,
but it was translated in the KJV of this verse, which I quoted
earlier to show that
the positive (favorable) or negative (punitive) sense of PQD
can be determined by the
way it was used. Here is my citation of the very same verse cut and
pasted from an earlier
section of my reply.
Genesis 21:1 And Yahweh visited [PQD] Sarah as he had said, and Yahweh did unto Sarah as he had spoken. 2 For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.
So PQD is translated as "visited" in the KJV, which Turkel almost always uses when he quotes scripture, and the context in which it was used clearly denotes that Yahweh "visited" Sarah in order to bestow a blessing. The word "did," as Turkel claimed, really does very little to convey the positive nature of PQD. This is done in verse 2, which states what it was that Yahweh did for Sarah.
[Earlier Turkel criticized me for quoting 25 translations, at which time he said that doing this was "a classic example of superficial scholarships" and later said that "any OT schoolboy knows that simply listing translations is insufficient scholarship," but now we see him doing what? Abandoning his old trusty KJV and shopping around for translations that will support his view. Consistency doesn't seem to be one of Turkel's virtues.]Turkel:
Gen. 40:4 - The captain of the guard assigned ("paqad") them to Joseph, and he attended them. After they had been in custody for some time...
Till:
All we have to do is keep my comments about homographs in mind. PQD
had different
meanings in Hebrew as does bear in English. If we heard someone
say, "I can't bear
to see animals suffer," who would think that the homograph bear
was being used here
to convey the sense of the ursine animal that we call a "bear"? If
someone said, "I don't
know what this word means," who would think that the person was using
this homograph in the
sense of "midway" or "average"? The homograph PQD could mean
"appoint," "commit to,"
or "assign," and the context in this verse shows that this was the
sense intended. Where is
the problem? Is this the best that Turkel can do in his quest to prove
that the homograph
PQD was so ambiguous or mysterious in meaning that we just can't
be sure what it
meant in Hosea
1:4?
Turkel:
Ex. 3:16 - "Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers--the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--appeared to me and said: I have watched ("paqad") over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt.'
Till:
I also used this same verse earlier to show that context will determine
whether PQD
was used in a positive or negative sense. Here is what I noted.
Exodus 3:15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. 16 Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited [PQD] you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt.
When the next verse goes on to say, "I declare that I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey," the positive (favorable) usage of PQD is very clearly indicated. I'm sure a speaker of Hebrew would have encountered no more trouble understanding the word in this context than an English speaker has with words like bear and bear.
Turkel:
Ex. 32:34 - "Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish ("paqad") them for their sin.
Till:
The KJV of this verse says, "Nevertheless in the day when I visit [pqd],
I will visit
[pqd] their sin upon them." So again the context in which PQD
was used
indicated that it conveyed a negative or punitive sense. Where's the
problem?
Turkel:
Num. 1:3-21 - In these verses, "paqad" is used several times in
relation
to the numbering of the Hebrews. The KJV and NIV offer no English word
as a parallel.
Till:
Well, whether three times would be "several" times is debatable, but
there certainly is no
problem. The PQD homograph in Hebrew sometimes meant "to count"
or "number," and the
context, which is clearly narrating the taking of a census, makes it
clear that PQD
had that meaning in this particular context, so where is the problem?
Surely, Turkel
wouldn't argue that PQD in Hosea 1:4 could have meant "count"
or "number" or "assign"
or "appoint" because it was so used in other passages. As for Turkel's
claim that the KJV
and NIV "offer no English word as a parallel," I have to wonder what he
means. Both versions
use the word number in this passage, so "number" is an
appropriate "parallel" to PQD
in this particular context.
Where is the problem?
Turkel:
1 Ki. 11:28 - Now Jeroboam was a man of standing, and when Solomon saw how well the young man did his work, he put him in charge of the whole labor force of the house of Joseph.
Note: "Paqad" here is used to refer to Jeroboam being "put in charge" of the labor force.
Till:
Yes, in the same way that the homograph PQD was translated
"assigned" in
Genesis
40:4 to denote that
Joseph was put in charge of the pharaoh's chief guards and butlers when
they were put into
prison with Joseph, PQD in this verse also denoted "assign to"
or "put in charge of"
or "appoint." The homograph sometimes carried this meaning, and the
context enables readers
to understand whether PQD was being used in the sense of
"visit" or "remember" or
"punish" or "count" or "assign" or "appoint," etc., so I will have to
ask again where the
problem is.
Turkel:
1 Ki. 14:27 - So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned ("paqad") these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace.
Till:
Sigh! See my comments immediately above. I do hope that those who may
be in Turkel's
"adoring fold" are at least beginning to see how hard he has to strain
to try to find
a point to use in support of his position.
Turkel:
1 Ki. 20:26 - The next spring Ben-Hadad mustered ("paqad") the Arameans and went up to Aphek to fight against Israel.
Till:
Let's look at the KJV of this verse--which is Turkel's favorite
version--and its immediate
context.
26 And it came to pass at the return of the year, that Benhadad numbered [PQD] the Syrians, and went up to Aphek, to fight against Israel. 27 And the children of Israel were numbered [PQD], and were all present, and went against them: and the children of Israel pitched before them like two little flocks of kids; but the Syrians filled the country.
We have already noted that the homograph PQD could carry the meaning of counting or numbering, and in this passage, a counting or numbering of soldiers was done in order to go to battle. Thus, it would be appropriate in this context to use the word "muster." The "numbering" in the passage that Turkel cited in Numbers is another example of how this homograph was used, because the census or counting was done in order to determine how many men there were of military age (1:2-3). PQD was used four times in Judges 20-21 in reference to the "numbering" of the children of Benjamin and the "men of Israel" as Benjamin prepared for war against the other tribes of Israel in the matter concerning the ravishing of the Levite's concubine. The men on both sides were "numbered," but this was done in order to "muster" them for military service. The homograph PQD sometimes meant to count or number and was used when counting or numbering was done in order to muster armies. Where is the problem? Does Turkel have any trouble recognizing this meaning when he reads the verse in context?
Turkel:
2 Ki. 3:6 - So at that time King Joram set out from Samaria and mobilized ("paqad") all Israel.
Till:
See my comments above. The KJV says, "King Joram went out of Samaria
the same time, and
numbered all Israel," so all that we have in this verse is an
example of counting or
numbering that was done in order to "muster" or "mobilize" an army.
Where is the problem?
How does any of this show that we just can't tell from the context of
Hosea 1:4 what PQD
meant in this particular verse?
Turkel:
2 Ki. 12:11 - When the amount had been determined, they gave the money to the men appointed ("paqad") to supervise the work on the temple. With it they paid those who worked on the temple of the LORD--the carpenters and builders...
Till:
Yes, as I have already noted, the homograph PQD was used at
times to mean "appoint"
or "assign," and this is just one example of others that could be given
when it was so used.
Does Turkel seriously think that any of this proves that the meaning of
PQD in Hosea
1:4 just can't be determined?
Another point should be made here. Turkel ranted about how my practice of quoting translations is "superficial" scholarship, but look what he has done. He has selected a Hebrew homograph that was used in several senses in an effort, I assume, to prove that its meaning in a particular passage just can't be determined, but in every example that he cited, the context in which PQD appeared made it easy to determine whether it meant "visit," "remember," "punish," appoint," "assign," "count," "muster," etc. So just who is showing signs of superficial scholarship?
[Addendum July 2005: Turkel usually quotes from the KJV, but in the passages that he quoted above, he used the NIV in a deceptive effort to make his readers think that translators can't decide if PQD meant visit or remember or muster and so on, but if he had stuck to his KJV, he would have found more consistency in translating this word, as I showed by answering each of his quotations with what the KJV said. He tries to play both sides of the street. If I quote 36 different translations that say essentially the same thing about the meaning of paqad in Hosea 1:4, he calls this "superficial scholarship," but, of course, when he quotes just one other translation, i. e., the NIV, that is "in-depth scholarship." How can anyone trust anything that he says?]
Turkel:
So, the obvious difficulty with this word helps explain why translators
continue to use
"punish" in Hosea 1:4.
Till:
Obvious difficulty? What obvious difficulty? Would Turkel please tell
us which of the
examples he cited were such that the meaning of PQD just
couldn't be determined from
the context? To show the absurdity of his line of argumentation, let's
suppose that a
person who speaks English should encounter the following statement in a
written text: "She
couldn't bear children." That statement alone would be insufficient to
determine whether
bear meant "to give birth to" or "to endure or tolerate";
however, if the text went
on to say, "She found them to be insufferable and avoided all
situations where she might
encounter the little brats," this additional information would make the
meaning of bear
in this context quite clear to anyone whose native language is English.
If this isn't enough to convince Turkel that he has led us down a long tangent that went nowhere, then I suggest that he just browse through an unabridged dictionary. He will find that it lists homographs as separate words and that they are commonplace in English, yet I'm sure he doesn't think that he has any particular difficulty reading and understanding the English language. It is only English versions of the Bible that give him problems. Does Turkel, for example, have any problems determining from context which leave is being used when he encounters this homograph? Perhaps he won't mind telling us.
Turkel:
It is also explained by a couple of other factors
Most importantly [sic] - and a good reason why the majority of Till's translations don't carry this interpretation! - is that the detailed linguistic work....
Till:
My, my, Turk