Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

I’ve been interacting with Kris over at Old School Script for the last day or so about Psalm 19:4, particularly the particle בלי toward the end of the verse.  Here was my last comment in my part of the exchange so far:

Okay. So, I realize I was probably too brief and unclear above, but I think what I was trying to suggest is what is suggested by the UBS Handbook on Psalms. According to how I am reading the text, the logic would be as follows:

vs. 2 creation(i.e. heaven/sky) is telling/proclaiming God’s glory/handiwork
vs. 3 day/night are doing so too (i.e. pouring forth speech and knowledge)
vs. 4 but they do so silently, or without words (reading with the NASB – There is no speech, nor are there words; Their voice is not heard. *with the particle being the simple negative “not” and no insertion “whose” as a smoothing over of “who their voice is not”)
vs. 5a their line (as opposed to their voice – the phonological similarity between qavam and qolam would actually be used to draw a contrast, i.e. like the familiar “don’t get mad, get glad” play on words) goes out (if qavam is being used to phonologically to draw a contrast, this would explain why it seemingly appears out of nowhere when all of these other speech words are activated)
vs. 5b is a synonymous parallel with what precedes – their message/report/testimony goes out to then ends of the earth (the UBS Handbook recommends translating as “message/report/testimony” here because they have understood verse 4 to say that the testimony is unspoken, thus translating as “speech” does not work.

Psalm 19 is a text that I’ve also been interested in for quite some time. Consider clicking over to Kris’s blog and chiming in on the discussion.  I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts as well, particularly about the use of the particle in verse 4 and how the surrounding text might influence how one reads the particle.

I’ve mentioned within the last week or so on this blog that I’ve been working as a part of a team on a tool called the Bible Sense Lexicon for Logos Bible Software.  Yesterday, there was a post on the Logos Blog explaining one of the ways the tool could be used, namely getting the contextual meaning of a word in the form of a definition, rather than just a gloss.  Check out the post by Morris Proctor entitled: Logos 5: Sense in Word by Word

I’ve come upon two new blogs this week, one from two friends I made this year at SBL, Jimmy and Jessica Parks, and one from Kris Lyle, who I knew of from my dissertation supervisor and my friend Josh Westbury, but didn’t know that he blogged.  Kris attended the same university where I did my PhD and where Josh is working on his.

Jessica and Jimmy (I’m going to alternate their names so as not to appear sexist) have what appears to be a new blog called “This does what now?”  And, from their coursework this semester it looks like they are going to have a lot of upcoming posts that I’ll be excited to read.  To whet you appetite, you can check out their post entitled: Ancient Hebrew Lexicons.  I’ve recently done a fast read of Cruse, as well as in the past read the introduction to cognitive linguistics he co-wrote, and have been working with BDB and HALOT day in and day out for a year.  I’ll be interested to see if they blend some of that coursework and talk a little bit about the lexicons in light of what they read in Cruse on lexical semantics.

Kris’s blog is called Old School Script.  It’s hard not to love a blog when you click over to it and see the first post on the page entitled “Do words have meanings?”  Check it out that post for a quick primer on lexical semantics.