Chapter 1 continues.
Section E: Collective Concepts and Ideas
Part 2: Platonic Parallels
First, a brief reminder here. I learned from linguistic experts that Greek, as with other western languages, tends to see language as a conveyance of content. Words have pools of meaning. Hebrew sees their language as signposts to a land or persons worthy of acquaintance. There’s a whole lot more than can be put into words. Boman never got this message.
Instead, he offers an explanation that is only half-correct. Quoting someone else, he lays out that Hebrew language is composed almost entirely of nouns and verbs. Thus, it is things and people who act, and their actions. Virtually all verbs are active, portraying something you cannot miss. By contrast, Plato’s ideas leave us with a language that is more passive, though solid enough. He expends a lot of words portraying the action of a magnet “passively” drawing things to itself as a metaphor for the Greek language.
Boman then says a lot in trying to convince readers that Plato and Greek language don’t actually portray man on his own power seeking the Good (equating it with God). This he says, referring to a culture that was notorious for being inherently man-centric. Man was the measure of all things in Greece, and Plato was partly responsible for that. This time, instead of pulling Hebrew toward the Greek philosophy, Boman drags Plato closer to the Hebrew.
The one thing he fails to address head-on so far is that Greek aims to make ideas and language impersonal and objective. The Ideal, the Good, is static and unchanging, while the Hebrew God was most emphatically a living person.
The chapter ends there.
Lol, it sounds like you are getting tired of Bowman’s perspective, although I appreciate your critique of it. I am stalling out in chapter 3 where he discusses the difference between the Hebrew and Greek concepts of time which I feel he has dragged out unnecessarily for reasons I can’t divine.
Well, Boman does some things well. His bias is simply tiresome, but I’ll take it in stride and keep reviewing until we are done.
Alright, then I will trudge on with you, lol, but this whole thing is moving me to get back into Hebrew again. Something inevitably throws me off it and I have to basically start over again. I will email you a link to this cat who wrote his own Hebrew lexicon that actually tells you what the words literally meant in Hebrew, and he also includes the Paleo script which has additional symbolic significance, so I wonder what you would think about that. I don’t recall if you have written about how the language was distorted (and hidden) to a degree when the script was changed to the block type that was taken from another language (which I cannot recall off the top of my head).
If nothing else, this review of Boman gives me a chance to rant 😉
While I knew about the shift from the paleo script to the Aramaic block script during the Exile, I had not heard of deception connected to it. I’m not surprised, since an odd collection of things had changed dramatically during the Exile. The Second Temple period is loaded with both insights and lies.