To Marcus Wood: Thank you for your post on construct expressions versus B- and ''SR' expressions to indicate location. But aren't eponyms such as 'Judah', etc. biblically not only geographical but the people who claim to be descended from the eponymic ancestor, i.e. a sort of ethnic identification which is related to the geographical meaning? In this sense PT'Y <Judah, Ephraim, etc.> would be equivalent syntactically to 'men of Judah, Israel, etc.' or even BNY 'sons of Judah, Israel, etc.' In this sense I do think the construct expression 'simple ones of Judah' is well read within this well-attested biblical Hebrew range of sense, such that the sense is that these 'simple ones' are Judah-ites. (The term would technically leave open that they would not need to be present in Judah, i.e. they could be Judah-ites somewhere else, but the text of pHab is everywhere else situated in Judah so the simple ones, who are Judah-ites, would also be assumed to be in Judah, along with the wicked priests, Jerusalem, the doers of the law, etc. in Judah, in the world of the text.) There is the term 'wicked ones of-- Judah, Ephraim, Israel, the nations, etc.' which would be exactly analogous syntactically to 'simple ones of--'. If these expressions were encountered in biblical Hebrew no one would think of reading them as social bodies unrelated to the geographic/ethnic designating sense. It seems to me the burden of proof ought to be on those advocating innovative and previously unattested senses wholly different from the known, routine biblical Hebrew range of meanings of words used in Qumran texts. I agree that the phenomenon of sobriquets certainly does occur in the pesharim, so it is not in principle impossible that an ancient authorial choice could be made in the world of these texts to select some name or word--'Judah', 'Ephraim', 'Israel', 'Jerusalem', 'the land', etc.--and use it as a nickname or sobriquet or code to stand in for something else disconnected from its apparent, surface meaning, such as a particular contemporary social group. It is simply that when I looked at the examples that are cited I just don't see it. It does not seem to me to be a necessary reading in any individual instance, nor is it even possible as a general (across-the-board) reading applicable to all cases. If this kind of assumption of coded meanings underneath terms is to be applied to the pesharim, why stop there? Why not move into the Psalms, and start proposing social groups were intended by the authors of those texts underneath the visible text in coded ways when encountering similar terms there? (Some hymns or psalms seem still to be being written contemporary with the Qumran pesharim, or at least it is commonly supposed that this is the case, and some of these hymns or psalms use the terms 'Judah' and 'Israel', so this question is not a completely hypothetical one.) In the end the issue seems to be the basic one of how to determine meaning when encountering words in Qumran texts. Most words in Qumran texts read very well in their biblical Hebrew sense, or sometimes there is semantic development in ways that can be reconstructed. But the three-sect codeword theory is a different animal. If there are well-established semantic ranges already known for a word in biblical Hebrew, and if the word reads well within its known range in the Qumran texts, and if there is no positive evidence requiring some innovative, different meaning ... why assume it? Still, there is much that is uncertain and unknown about the pesharim. Perhaps in the process of discussion unexpected insights will emerge which will bring more clarity to these topics. Greg Doudna (not a Doctor) For private reply, e-mail to "Greg Doudna" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from Orion, e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: "unsubscribe Orion." Archives are on the Orion Web site, http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il.
