"Psycho-Content-Analysis of Bible Languages"

2008-08-13T12:21:00.001-07:00

On Thinking, On Singing:
Reflections on the Practice of Chanting the Psalms of Ascent
In Anglican Plainsong-- By Comparison to a Hebraic Model

I have with some regularity been 'singing' as Anglicanized plainsong the Psalms of Ascent (Ps 102-134) from the King James Bible; this comes in lieu of precise memorization, which is important but tedious to me because I have to invest so much time in 'the rote.'

My observations are as follows:

A. The Englishing of these poems, a "Psalter within a Psalter" is a mode conducive to thought, and the practice of both singing and diction. Best done slowly, this chanting has time-- and a 'je ne sais quoi ' of sensed sublimnity not easily matched otherwise in worship. I would suggest doing this alone, after mastery of some of the simple skills of Anglican chant, at home perhaps, or elsewhere as conditions of solitude permit.

While I am not memorizing verses, I am learning something else fundamental to utterance and that precedent of utterance, thought: I am learning the better some basic prosodic pattern to 'church language' not easily conveyed by other means. This 'ecclesiastical accent' when mixed with all the skids-talk-white and African-Americanisms I hear and practice comes out in other modes and ways-- such as in poetry of a folk idiom. Much of this bears the alliterative and assonant tendencies of Englished folk verse like Beowulf and Piers Plowman; otherwise I have too a manic's tendency toward rhyming ('clang') association. When I write verse, as in "The River Raver: Lays from a Lollard in Louisville," thematically the mix of the-streets with the-Religion in the prosodic combination to which I allude here seems to derive from the large amount of time I spend in actual singing such as this-- in a voice not 'too good' but trying hard for the meter of thought.

This leads me to think that such making-music can be a cognitive and even 'logical' problem-solving practice. I am told that the ancient Greeks considered the study of music to fall under mathematics, and indeed I know that much of music can be defined in mathematical portion and symmetry. In a basal cognitive sense, therefore, I think that such 'mathematics-musical' really abets a kind of sharpening of the words and the pungency of one's way of expression of words. The only word (unfortunately Sanskrit and of Hindu extraction) that I can think of to fulfill this concept is Mantra-- the saying of something metrically meted, of unitary thought. Other English expressions-- 'slogan,' 'enthymeme,' 'one-liner'-- all seem to miss-the-message that this form of logo-cizing potently affects the potency (on the giving and the receiving ends) of communication. For this reason, I think that Mohandas Gandhi and his Satyagrahi were able-- with punch-words-Mantric-- to talk-down the Imperial Raj from Sovereignty to submission.

B. The Englishing differs in quality and quantity from that expressed in Hebrew. I lack the Psalter in audio-recorded Hebrew; here I can only compare with the metric Creation Poem of Genesis 1-2 as read on the audio CDs by SAFRA--Voices of Heritage (2004); I think the artist reading the Hebrew is Omar Frenckel. At any rate, the meter of this versification seems stress-accentual-mostly-anapestic, with much rhyming of a structural and contrived sort, with considerable inner/Leonine rhyming. In contrast, I use a meter consistent with ecclesiastic English language, which as is known is of a stanzaic sort, 'up' then 'down' with syllibification being rather inconsequential to the up:down sequence.

C. This leads me to think that the-music of an utterance is the-first-message-heard; it does imply a kind of 'syntax' in concession to Chomskians, but this is a metrical syntax really-- where the 'prettiness' coupled with the sense of the words generates cognition -- on an integrative level. This bespeaks what I have read from linguist Roman Jakobson, and indeed Jakobson is the linguist I most admire now for social science contribution... which is a way of describing my bias (Greek: 'life-force') as well as my interpolated validity.

--Vernon Lynn Stephens, Culdee
Time of Vespers

"Implicature" Vs. "Explicature": Psychological Analysis of Text-Logic, Using [Again] Psalm 8 as Example

2006-02-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

I am learning as I expound: that is the one great virtue of being able to keep a 'blog' as a kind of published journal of one's ongoing thoughts on a topic or cluster of topics. My thinking has taking me to the place where I would like to do the following, to inaugurate 'some new thing' before the eyes of humankind, i.e. derived tools for assessing the psychological content of an "author," or in turn whomever an author happens to be discussing, using an analysis-of-variance approach in a qualitative and quantitative sense to "get at" the meaning behind a text. I have decided to keep with Psalm 8 in the original Hebrew and N.R.S.V. versions, as a reference-point for describing the 'eusebic' mode of utterance I posit as instanced in this Psalm as a genre of linguistic mood hitherto unrecognized, and I shall endeavor to point out how numerous 'moods' affect the propositional sense-- thus the logic-- of whatever syllogistic or Boolean ratiocination one might wish to engage in. Then-- toward the end of this entry-- I shall discuss aspects and implications of this thesis in comparison and contrast with other workers in the logic of language.

My general feeling is at this time-- not in any pat or fully-resolved sense but in an aura of "anteanteantepenultimacy," that mood-- even capricious and complex mood close to the sense understood by "mood" in the common English parlance: 1. has its own logic which needs to be respected in any psychosocial interpretation of an utterance; 2. affects the workings of "cold logic" because the timbre of connotations and psychosocial "implicature" -- understood in the modern linguistic sense as a reasonable inference based on the context of an utterance as to what it means-- have a bearing on exactly whatever a proposition means. We shall anticipate that this thesis will not have a "smooth ride" among either linguists or logicians, but that is only to speculate that this idea needs the buffeting of reasoned scholarship in time to be 'fleshed out' into a systematic and coherent whole.

We shall see how this comes to bear on Bible language, again resorting to Psalm 8. What I want to do is spend several entries unravelling this piece of Hebrew poetry, which is a literary whole having much to teach us about linguistics and thus of psychological content analysis of linguistics vis a vis the Bible. I would encourage the reader to "print" a copy of my last entry-- "Modal Logic" as the Essential Paradigm for Resolving Implicature Problems in Bible Languages and Other Linguistic Issues," from this web-log dated Friday, February 3, 2006. I know that at the present time "About Me," and "Previous Posts" are buried well-down-into the blog, causing the reader to have to scroll down considerably to get to this section [? is this called the "Index" ?], but until I get this problem fixed, this scrolling to get to "Previous Posts," then selecting the 2/3/2006 entry for "print" seems to be the only practical and "fair" way to approach this project involving several entries analyzing Psalm 8, as well as for getting a good idea as to where this entire project wants to "lead itself." The print I did with my PC was 7 pages long; yours will no doubt be about the same length for the 2/3/2006 entry.

In appreciating this literary work, I shall make a number of forays into the linguistics, broadly conceived, of Psalm 8. What I would like to do is compare a parsing of the Hebrew words-- with particular reference to the richer, more-complex mood structure of Hebrew verbs-- versus a reaching-for-implicature by way of context-analysis. As to the necessity for doing context-analysis when researching implicature-- by which I essentially mean what a proposition entails in all its semantics for the logic of an utterance-- we need only turn to John Lyons, who in his fine work --with which I occasionally disagree propositionally but find excellent overall--Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2002 (1995), at p. 169 saying, "The important thing to note... is that implicature is context-dependent and therefore...is a matter of utterance meaning." Context in a poem like Psalm 8 in Hebrew is largely submerged; we lack survey methods or a physics that will enable us to go backward in time-and-place of the work's construction to derive a feeling for what the geography, sociology, and psychology of the poet of Psalm 8 was, But it is important to note that language contains clues as to context; close reading of a text, as well as the texts in which a text is embedded linguistically, can not only 'milk' the text of cultural/sociological implications for an utterance-- see Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, by M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Oxford University Press, 1990 (1985), see "Coda: Learning through Text in Context," pp.117-118-- but also for many decades it has been known that psychological content of a text's 'author' can be inferred from such a reading-- see Content Analysis in Communication Research, by Bernard Berelson, Hafner Publishing Company, New York, New York, 1971 (1952), pp. 75-80. [This last-mentioned author, Berelson, is especially devoted to quantitative techniques in doing psychological content analysis, but he does treat some aspects of this work as better-suited for qualitative research.]

What I would like to do in this inaugural piece is outline where I would like to go with 'psycho-content-analysis' of Psalm 8-- particularly in Hebrew-- the N.R.S.V. and indeed any translation of the Hebrew is derivative text to me--and to limn out the hypotheses I would like to fit to the 'data' of the Psalm. I would like to propose-- in keeping with this investigation-- that I do work in what I shall define as explicature and implicature-- as I shall define them.

"Implicature" is a concept we know from Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991 (1989), Chapters 2 and 3, and from the John Lyons book already cited. I shall operationally define it as the propositional sense that all denotations and connotations and word-color and prosody add to the meaning of an utterance, as well as the psychosocial CONTEXT in reference thereto. I do not completely know whether this jibes with the definition of implicature most linguists and logicians use, but to me it seems identical to that presented-- in its full implications-- by John Lyons, and also by Paul Grice, who makes much of "conversational implicatures"-- which differ from what he called "conventional implicatures" because the conversational-type are implied by context, while the conventional are entailed by logical necessity.

Then I shall define "explicature"-- a new word in language study but conceptually not new-- as the general pattern of language as found by linguistic analysis, such as parsing, componential analysis [conceived pragmatically, not as a universal abstraction for language], and the manifest expression of language in the utterance, WITHOUT CONSIDERATION OF CONTEXT. Language students familiar with the work of Gottlob Frege may be wiling to consider my definition of explicature to be roughly cognate with his Sinn-- an utterance's specific 'intra-text' meaning-- as compared with his Bedeutung, which seems more coherent with context-inherent implicature, above.

The point I shall eventually get around to making is that very often for ancient texts-- like Psalm 8 in Hebrew-- we lack meaningful ways of determining 'context' but by a careful reading of the 'text.' Here the primary 'measure' for implicature is explicature, to which is applied all the tools of modern linguistic analysis and scientific reasoning. The method is contextual-to-the-text because it analyzes the text from a multiplicity of modes of purposive inquiry and not simply, "What it reads up-front." But this method of reaching-implicature-by-extreme-explicature, we shall see, is highly productive for what we want to do.

I wish I were better-equipped to study the metrical qualities of Psalm 8. I have every reason to believe that if it is like the Genesis story of Creation, its aural effect will have impact on what inferences one makes about the propostions the Psalmist utters; I have heard this Creation story in Hebrew, and I was impressed by such linguistic matters as internal rhyme, and metrical features. These qualities to my mind come to bear on the presentation of the text, and as the reader will presently see, I do think that such 'music' as well as the total Gestalt of this utterance-- or any utterance-- affects its 'logic.'

My categories, explicature and implicature, are thus presented. With these concepts comes a derivative concept that a good and valid measure of context-- and thus of implicature-- can be had by exhaustive scientific analysis of the explcature of a text. I have promised to fit them hypothetically to Psalm 8, and this will take several sessions of long entries. My hypothetical constructs will first have to prove reliable in the analysis of Psalm 8, etc., then practice and practice and practice with appropriate testing will prove whether the categories are valid. The scientific standard for whether a category is valid is as follows: 1. the categorization-scheme must be exhaustive-- include all cases in the 'universe'; 2. the categories must be mutually-exclusive-- by which I mean that there is no overlap at all in the data between the several [here being 2] categories. [Source: Central Tendency and Variability, by Herbert F. Weisberg, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, California, 1992, p. 13.] The reader should note from the outset that my use of explicature to get-at implicature is a contextual reading of the text-- at all points the implicature is an inference based on a presumed context as it may present itself-- at all points the implicature is not manifest in the text but derived by analysis of the situation-- at all points implicature is a second-order or derivative construct from the primary text itself, whereas explicature implies a direct reading. My work with Psalm 8-- which should run into at least 4 writing sessions in this 'blog' and perhaps several more entries than that-- should ascertain whether my categories are viable or whether they are insensitive to piercing the modal logic of Psalm 8, the Bible languages, or any text.

I have read, really re-read John Lyons' Chapter 6 from Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, there are points at which I would like to take issue with him. He says, pp. 175-178, that ordinary language cannot readily be examined from the standpoint of propositional logic-- even modal logic, but is characterized as being "expressive." Lyons goes on to do a splendid job of lining out the various moods affecting expressive utterance, but concludes, p. 198, that logic is deficient for description of language. This proposition stands in remarkable contrast to that of D. Paul Snyder, Modal Logic and Its Applications, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, New York, 1971, who confidently asserts:

"Some of the machinery of modal logic suggests a way of handling statements like

"Sherlock Holmes cuaght Professor Moriarty" without commiting ourselves to the

(actual) existence of either the detective or the criminal. In a similar way, the

machinery we will develop for modal logic will suggest a way of handling statements

-- or quasi-statements-- which are neither blatant nonsense nor the sort of thing we

would want to claim to be true or false. "The present King of France is wise" has been

called simply false by some philosophers, but others have objected, saying that to call

this statement false is to say that "The present King of France is not wise" must be true,

leaving us with a true statement about a non-existent king. Whichever position one

chooses, it is interesting to note that formal systems can be developed which allow us

to include statements like "The present King of France is wise" and the "The present

King of France is not wise" and treat them both as false without (really) tampering with

the Law of Excluded Middle."

[Page 11, ibid.]

From this I glean that work has been done to clarify that even fictions have a kind of 'logic' that must be respected. My additional point-- besides the banter about modal logic in which I am of course a novice-- is that every aspect of language comes to bear on the propositional sense of an utterance and its terms. We find two entirely differing propositions of "rose": 1. in a botanical flora; 2. versus that in William Blake's "O Rose, thou art sick./The invisible worm/That flies in the night,/In the howling storm/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy,/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy." John Lyons is right that no symbolic-logic formulae have yet to be devised to differentiate logically such propostionality, but this is not to say that with great patience, and a mind for complexity, such a logical portrayal could not be devised. In the very same way, Kindergarten songs are easier to score musically than -- for example -- a piece of electronic music like Spiral by Vangelis. Clearly, though, chromaticism and semantic range and syntactic considerations and prosody-- the "music of language"-- all come to bear on the terminology in an utterance and thus affect its propostional sense. If I understand D. Paul Snyder correctly, there may be a way in which "moods" other than the indicative can be analyzed for their own 'logic,' and in time-- again with patience-- and moreover with discipline--the structure of all manner of linguistic modalities-- for the subjunctive, imperative, interrogative, optative, volative-- and for admiring the sunset in a rugged mountain setting and for the anticipation of a letter in return for a love-letter sent...and for all such moods which have their "logic."

Psalm 8 begins and ends in awe, in eusebic mood. Verse 8:1a is identical to verse 8:9, invokes the majesty of Jahweh. The mode of humility is apparent from onset of the poem, with mention that "[o]ut of the mouths of babes and infants" Jahweh has prepared a "bold-place, a strong-hold," which will shut up the-man-who-avenges-himself [against the babes and infants including us!] "What are human beings that you [meaning Jahweh] are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" Wonder at this surprising reversal of mundane values continues when the Psalmist says, "Yet you have made them a little lower than God [ Hebrew: )^l^h^y^m ] and have given human beings "dominion," verse 8:6 {Hebrew word: t^m^$^y^l^h^w, "You + have + caused-to-rule, given-dominion-to, appointed ruler") over the things of the world and its creatures. The implication-- close to being the implicature-- is that the writer assumes a kind of 'custodial' status for humankind, to rule over nature and dominate it as a potentate. The Psalmist seems awed by the fact that this 'supervisiory status' is unwarranted, and that really humankind is fragile and weak before the Self-Existence, Jahweh. It has never been convincing to me that humans rule over nature; I live in a world known to have contagious diseases, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, deaths-by-lighteningbolt, and there is the threat of crop failure that CAN occur in all farmlands. And of course, I read about how almost all life on this planet was destroyed by a meteorite hitting Earth, and that there are other meteorites in deep space with 'our name on it.' But I am impressed by another logic from this second-or-third-or-fourth glance at Psalm 8, which now I shall explicate as a 'rough draft' of a modal logic, based on my English-language readings and subsequent language analysis of the Hebrew.

The 'logic' of humankind governing nature by way of dominion falls flat on me, perhaps because I am a 21st century man who has seen man as one player in an immense cosmic 'soap opera.' What logic does shine forth as a redeeming quality in this poem is not so much human domination, but human vulnerability and a sense of the sublime. Here a good translation like the N.R.S.V.-- but also let us include others, not the least of which is the majestic K.J.V. -- still portray this sense of awe which I refer to as the eusebic mood. This is the logic of reverance for the Imponderable and rejoicing in one's "littleness," before this Greater Reality. In that specific sense, the mood is transcendent, i.e. beyond the pale of expressing human need to fulfill human wants, beyond all manipulation. The Psalmist is making clear here that whatever 'dominion' people have over nature, it is strictly a gift from The Self-Existence, Jahweh. The greatness of this Self-Existent-One supersedes all externals to the human condition.

I have experienced this eusebic mood in other ways than the Psalmist, but the sense of wonder that I have felt about both the strange kindnesses, the ordinary and extra-ordinary puzzles of life and nature, biological and geological and human crisis, the 'uncanny' quality of [especially] human nature, personal independence of the bondage to illusion to the foibles of the human condition are such like as to engender awe and reverence to me. And I see it in other places. The bond of animal-with-human when it is demonstrative, the sight of a rainbow, the witnessing of a devoted lover to the exacting cause of her beloved, great floods and rains, the sight of the Earth from an airplane at 40,000 feet above... all these things are what engender my awe, my reverence, my eusebic mood. These color my propositions about all these topics, until I find myself making syllogisms according to their definition, mostly definition-by-connotation. To this a 'score' of symbolic logic could eventually be derived, such as we witness beginning in D. Paul Snyder's work on modal logic.

In Psalm 8, we witness something besides a logic of questions-and-answers [Collingwood's postulate]; what the Psalmist has is not "question," but a kind of "answer-to-begin-with," namely a mood that he [?] is small and undeserving of the privileged position he seems to enjoy in the All [Hebrew: b^k^l -- "in {the} Totality".] But this "answer" is not a pat answer, nor is it the product of dialogue with some certain other or group-of-others; rather it is the mood of one who is overwhelmed in the All. We see this affecting the logic of the poem, for concept upon concept, we find the Psalmist telling us that before the skies, the abode-of-Jahweh, we small-ones have been fortunate. Any reading-- say "implicature"-- that would tend to justify Humankind as other than sheer-fortunate-given-vulnerabilities, any reading that would justify a notion that Humankind should be other than reverent before the All, is violent to the contextual thematics we have established. This is not, in other words, a facile prescription for taking the anthropoids who built the H-Bomb as the 'bosses' of a hapless nature, but a poem-of-gratitude, uttered in a mood-that-takes-the-breath-away.

There is logic in Psalm 8. It becomes the historical investigator not to exclusively seek the "question"[as R.G. Collingwood instructs] which preoccupied its writer, but its "mood-of-wonder," and to recognize that the moods which affect inquiry are protean and complex, dpendent on the utterer and the situation-of-utterance, and psychsocial exigencies. By strict propositional logic-- by explicature-- Psalm 8 has items which I find non-factual, egregious; but by closer reading for implicature-- I am left with words that I can live with, if not "believe," in much the same way that I believe in the tenderness of love. This-- I think-- is closer to the 'logic' of Psalm 8 than its supposed Dominion Theology!

"Modal Logic" as the Essential Paradigm for Resolving Implicature Problems in Bible Language and Other Linguistic Issues.

2006-02-03T17:32:00.000-08:00

By now I have re-read all of R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography, and have read the prime articles "Logic and Conversation," and "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation," Chapters 2 & 3 of Studies in the Way of Words, by Paul Grice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991 (1989), pp. 22-40; 41-57. I have come away with these readings with my own 'questions-and-answers,' as a kind of critique of the questions-and-answers method proferred by Collingwood, and by way of critique of the notion of the 'Cooperative Principle' espoused by Grice as the basis for implicature. The tack that I shall take is that neither of these two are being sufficiently general for covering all cultures under one logical 'mantle,' that what has been derived by these two is ethnically-dependent and class- and sub-class-dependent for its ideological and logical underpinnings, but a satisfactory basis for multi-expressive and multi-cultural evocation is beginning to be worked out in the discipline known as modal logic, whose gist is that there are 'logics' which are non-propositional but consistent unto themselves, like the "moods" ["modes," or "emotive-states"] of language.

I do have at my attention a couple of titles that treat of modal logic: 1. an introductory piece, good for me, a person who has just barely mastered symbolic logic at a college matriculate level-- "Sentence-Meaning and Propositional Content," Chapter 6 of Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, by John Lyons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2002 (1995), pp. 153-198; 2. the much more technical Modal Logic and Its Applications by D. Paul Snyder, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, New York, 1971. I suffer from "symbol shock" when I approach the language in which academic discussions of modal logic are framed, but in essence the idea of it all is quite simple: for every linguistic "mood," there is a "logic." The logic of the "indicative mood" is the usual mode of getting aritmetic and syllogisms accomplished, but there are also "logics" for the "oughts" and "shoulds" and "musts" of language. [These have special names which vary according to author and I shall not bore the reader-- save perchance until later when interests are whetted-- with the precise nomenclature per author per linguistic mood. Suffice it to say that R.G. Collingwood's stance of seeking-the-question-for-which-the-text-at-hand-is-an-answer is consistent with what Lyons identifies as an interrogative mood, pp. 190-191; what I want to do is expand on this list of moods that Lyons presents-- he goes on to include the "dubative [mode of doubt]," "exclamatives," "volatives," etc., etc., to include any "mood" in the personal experience that would affect the "logic/judgement" of the individual, reasons which could vary with the day, the time of day, and the situation[s] of the day.

To this end I am prepared to present Psalm 8, first in the New Revised Standard Version, then in the original Hebrew transliteration using the transliteration system of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, http://cal1.cn.huc.edu, then parsed using word-per-word renditions from The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, by Benjamin Davidson, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1997 (1850). Here follows Psalm 8--

8:l "O Lord, our Sovereign,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

8:2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants

you have founded a bulwark

because of your foes,

to silence the enemy and the avenger.

8:3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have established;

8:4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?

8:5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

and crowned them with glory and honor.

8:6. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under their feet,

8:7 all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

8:8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

8:9 O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The Hebrew Text:

8:1 -- y^h^w^h, "the most sacred name of God"; )^d^n^y^n^w, "our master/lord"; m^h, interrogative particle, "how?"; )^d^y^r, adjective masculine singular declension 1b., "great, mighty, noble, excellent"; $^m^k, noun masculine singular, suffix second person m/f, "Your Name"; b^k^l, preposition + noun masculine singular declension 8c., "in all, in/within [the] entire earth/world/creation/cosmos"; )^$^r, relative pronoun, "which, what, that"; t^n^h, verb, kal, imperative, singular masculine suffix 3 person singular masculine, "he must give, grant, appoint, render, make, do, constitute"; h^w^d^k, noun masculine singular, suffix second person singular masculine, "Your Glory, Majesty, Beauty, Brightness"; (^l, preposition, "upon, on, over, above"; h^$^m^y^m, definite-article + noun masculine, "the skies, heavens, abode-of-God."

8:2-- m^p^y, preposition + noun masculine singular construct., or with 1 person singular, "from [a] mouth"; (^w^l^l^y^m, noun masculine plural absolute, "children/youths/perpetuity/eternity/hidden-ness"; w^y^n^q^y^m, conjunction + verb kal participle imperfect active or substantive masculine plural, suffix 3rd person singular masculine, "and/also his suckling-children"; y^s^d^t, verb, piel, perfect, 2 person masculine, "thou-male hast laid a foundation, settled, sat-together-for-consultation, ordained, founded"; (^z, adjective, masculine, singular, declension 8c., "strong, vehement, fierce, fortified, harsh, cruel, hardened, bold, impudent"; l^m^(^n, adverb + substantive feminine, "to/toward [an] intent/purpose"; c^w^r^r^y^k, verb, kal participle, active, plural, suffix s person singular masculine singular, " thy binders-up/adversaries/shutters-up/distressers/'opponents'"; l^h^$^b^y^t, preposition + verb hiphel, perfect, 3 person singular masculine, "to/toward he-had-made-to-total-rest/cessation/quiet/quietude/desist/cease/interrupt/have-an-end/still/restrain/remove-with-assistance-from-others"; )^y^b, verb, kal, participle, active, singular, masculine, declension 7b., "hating"; w^m^t^n^q^m, conjunction + verb, hithpael, participle, singular masculine, "and/also him avenging-himself-intensively."

8:3-- k^y, particle, "which, for/because/that, nay for, but for, if, when, so, then, that if"; )^r^)^h, verb, kal, imperfect, 1st person singular, "I 'shall' see, exist, live, see-a-vision, look-at, regard, observe, see-with-delight, see-with-grief, care-for, provide, choose, have in view, discern, discriminate, understand, experience..."; $^m^k, noun masculine singular, suffix 2nd person masculine singular, "thy [male] sky/heaven/abode-of-God"; m^(^$^y, noun feminine plural construct state, "work [of an arificer], labor, business, occupation, deed,act, work, goods, fruits, produce"; )^c^b^(^t^y^k, noun feminine plural, suffix 2nd person singular masculine, "fingers/[poetically]the hands, 'digits' [a kind of measure], toes"; y^r^x, noun, masculine, declension 5a., "the moon, the lunar month, month"; w^k^w^k^b^y^m, conjunction + noun masculine singular declension 2b., "things-rolled-up, 'cakes,' stars"; )^$^r, relative pronoun, "who/which/that-which, where, whence, to that end, according to, because, if, that if"; k^w^n^n^t^h, verb, pilel, perfect, 3rd person singular feminine, which appears to be a 'poetic' reflexive rendering the sense "she had set-herself-up/established-herself/confirmed-herself/fashioned-herself/constituted-herself/prepared-herself/set-the-heart-of-herself/purposed-herself."

8:4-- m^h, pronoun, relative, "what, of what"; )^n^w^$, noun masculine singular [also sometimes a proper name!], from )^n^$, only appearing in the passive, 'incurable, mortal,' metaphorically 'grevious, sorrowful, of pain, grief of day, malignant [of the human heart], such that )^n^w^$ therefore by extension means "man, mankind, the common people"; k^y, particle, "which,that, because, but, but for, according to, that if, when, unless, if not..." etc.; t^z^k^r^n^w, verb, kal, imperfect, 2nd person singular masculine, suffix 3rd person singular masculine, "You [singular] shall remember/recollect/call-to-mind/be-born-male/make-a-memorial-offering/mention, make mention of/make-a-memorial-offering/record"; w^b^n, conjunction + noun masculine substantive irregular, "and/also [a] son/male-child, child, foster-son, 'pupil,' descendent, grandson [etc.]"; )^d^m, noun masculine singular, also 'Adam,' the first man, so accordingly translated, "[a] man/human-being-regardless-of-sex"; k^y, particle, "which, that, because, but, but for, according to, that if, when, unless, if not..." etc.; t^p^q^d^n^w, verb, kal, imperfect, 2 person plural masculine, "You [plural masculine] shall visit/come-to-see/punish/review/miss/look-after/take-care-of/set-over/appoint/take-charge-with/enjoin-upon/deposit/lay-up."

8:5-- w^t^x^s^r^h^w, conjunction + verb. piel, imperfect, 2nd person singular masculine, suffix 3rd person masculine singular, "and/also intensively Thou [singular masculine] shall cause to want/cause to fail/ cause to lack"; m^(^T, adverb, "a little"; m^)^l^h^y^m, preposition + noun masculine, singular and plural, "from the true God/gods/angels/'idols'"; w^k^b^w^d, conjunction + noun masculine singular, declension 3a., "and/also honor, glory, splendor, majesty, abundance, wealth, heart, mind, soul"; w^h^d^r, conjunction + noun masculine singular, declension 4a., "and/also ornament/splendor/honor"; t^(^T^r^h^w, verb, piel, imperfect, 3rd person singular feminine, suffix 3rd person singular masculine, "She shall crown [intensively 'surround, encompass'!]."

8:6-- t^m^$^y^l^h^w, verb, hiphel, imperfect, 2nd person plural, masculine, suffix 1st person singular, "You [masculine plural] 'shall' cause to rule, give dominion to, appoint ruler"; b^m^(^&^y, preposition + noun masculine singular, construct state, declension 9a., "in/into work [of an artificer], labor, business, occupation, deed, act, work [the fruit of one's labor], goods, property, produce, fruits"; y^d^y^k, noun common dual, suffix 2nd person singular singular masculine, "Thy [masculine] hands/powers/strengths/mights/cares/protections/spaces/places/memorials/monuments"; k^l, noun masculine singular, "all, every, all kinds of things, all sorts"; $^t^h, verb, kal, perfect, 2nd person, singular masculine, "Thou [masculine] hast put/set/placed/set-in-array, constituted, appointed, set [a limit], lay upon, directed, turned, set the eyes, rendered, given"; t^x^t, adverb and preposition, "below, beneath, under, in the place of, instead of"; r^g^l^y^w, noun, dual, suffix 3rd person singular masculine, "two feet [of man or beast]."

8:7-- c^n^h, noun common singular, "flock"; w^)^l^p^y^m, conjunction + noun masculine plural, absolute state, "thousand," by extension, "oxen"; k^l^m, noun masculine singular, suffix 3rd person plural masculine, " His all, every, any one, all sorts, any thing, all kinds"; w^g^m, conjunction + conjunction, "and/but also"; b^h^m^w^t, noun, feminine plural, construct, declension 11c., " of/by/in cows, female-animals, female dumb beasts"; &^d^y, noun masculine singular poetic, "plain, level country, piece of cultivated land, the fields [collectively], the country, territory."

8:8-- c^p^w^r, noun common singular or plural, also a proper name, "bird[s], sparrow[s]"; $^m^y^m, noun masculine plural, "skies/heavens/abode-of-God"; w^d^g^y, conjunction + noun masculine plural construct state, declension 2a., "fish[es]"; h^y^m, definite article + noun masculine construct, "sea, great river, the west"; (^b^r, verb, kal, infinitive or imperative singular masculine, "to pass over, overflow, overwhelm, pass through"; )^r^x^w^t, noun common plural construct, declension 10, "ways, roads paths, manners, modes, [poetically] travellers"; y^m^m, noun masculine plural absolute, declension 8a., "seas, great rivers, the west, the western quarter."

8:9-- y^h^w^h, the most sacred name of God, "Jahweh"; )^d^n^y^n^w, noun masculine, plural, suffix 1st person plural, "God[s] of us"; m^h, particle, pronoun, relative, "what," "how!"; )^d^y^r, adjective, masculine, singular, declension 1b., "great, mighty, noble, excellent"; $^m^k, noun masculine singular, suffix 2nd person masculine, "Thy [masculine] name/fame/reputation/name-after-memory/[periperally]monument"; b^k^l, preposition + noun masculine singular, "in/by/of all/every/all sorts of/any one/all kinds/whatsoever"; h^)^r^c, definite article + noun feminine singular, declension 6a., "the earth, land, ground, country, Gentile countries."

I cannot discuss the metrical qualities of this poem, except to say that according to its preface it is supposed to be sung to h^g^t^y^t, which could perchance be deciphered contextually from a close reading of the Psalm. What I do wish to illustrate from the pragmatic componential analysis above is that the "logic" of this poem is one of awe-- hardly a problem which needs 'solving' as R.G. Collingwood would have us engage in for a text; similarly the transcendentalism of the text supercedes notion of social communicatiion implied by Grice's Cooperative Principle. We need a new way to regard such texts, and a new way to regard all 'texts' that do not fit the modal logic of my two patriarchs and mentors, Collingwood and Grice.

What I propose is a generalized structure for examining 'moods' affecting logics, recognizing all the while that although there may be only one mood-indicative propositiional logic, there are still self-consistent and meaningful logics that are as transient and as permanent as tornadoes and bedrock, comparatively speaking, and just as diverse.

I think I have demonstrated in my parsing of Psalm 8 that a broad "swath" of denotations and conotations is possible from the Hebrew, and my ugly way of dealing with the analysis does nothing to point up what the original poet might have meant by penning down his words, or what they meant to generations of Jews who heard them afterward. For the mode of logic having to do with "awe," and "reverence" I invoke a new branch of modal logic the eusebic mode -- based on the Greek word eusebia, "reverence, awe."

It is clear that the original writings of the Bible have numerous passages in the eusebic mode of expression. These need to be appreciated in their own right. So do great works of reverence from other world religions, such as the Qur'an, the Vedas, Buddhist writings, the Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tze. But so does the reverence of true love-making need to be respected, great music and poetry, and the bond of animals for mankind and for other animals. This is all in the eusebic mode of logic. That it is non-propositional does not imply it lacks an internal consistency. Indeed, not a few psychologists might argue that such a logic has a priority over propositional logic in an affective, behavioral sense.

I leave these thoughts for the reader, to reverence the wonder of wonder as the Psalmist in this entry.

8:1

The Data "Within" and the Data "Beyond" the Text: First Musings in Psycho-Semantics of Bible Languages, With Special Reference to Q.

2006-01-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

Klaus Krippendorff is obviously a positivist in his orientation in Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, l980; everything about this book spells an interest in facts-only-as-they-show-themselves -in-the-text-of-a-communication. I do not think, therefore, that Krippendorff would agree with much of what I am about to propose in this blog entry as a general way of approaching text, and as a specific way of approaching Biblical text, with particular reference to the psychological content analysis of Q [which includes -- according to John S. Kloppenborg-- a world-recognized expert on Q-- both traditions for the original sayings of Jesus and John-Baptizer.]

What I wish to examine in this entry-- briefly-- is the positivist tradition as far as I know it, and then to discuss potential ways of analyzing text for what it implies-- by which I mean that we regard text as an outcropping of concealed data from another level/source.

Now we associate the name "positivism" with the 19th century French philosopher Auguste Comte, who taught that we are only to regard what would now be called the 'objective behavioral manifestations' of a social enterprise or personality in writing a history or biography. Comte wrote a treatise entitled The Positive Philosophy, in which he argued that economic factors would underlie social thought throughout the rest of the century in which he lived... which proved a true prophecy! Comte was an utter determinist, who denied free will; his method influenced the historical methodology of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), a German encyclopedic historian who was the patriarch of the 'scientific method' in historiography. This method can be summed up in two terms: 1. tell things as they actually ocurred; 2. "...if it is not in the documents, it did not exist." [For this summary I am endebted to the excellent volume From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2001, pp. 12-13.]

But nowadays, text is but one dimension in the multi-dimensional mix of bearings upon which to affix a valid 'reading' of a document. We also have archeology, paleo-ethnology, the panoply of scientific dating procedures [radio-carbon, atomic-absorption, pollen-counting-analysis, etc. etc.], numismatics, and -- not insignificantly-- linguistics. This last-mentioned discipline, linguistics, is especially useful in ascertaining the context under which there may have been an Aramaic substate-- for example -- putatively for Q-- and is not valueless as a tool for assessing the psychology of such personalities as Jesus and John-Baptizer. [Admittedly, one should nearly always add the proviso that the Gospels provide an edited picture of such people and careful use of the reductive, historical-critical method is but a good beginning place for the psychological study of these people!] So it is to linguistics and the general use of language that I turn now to describe potential tools for assessing ways for getting at inferences not directly stated in the text.

It has been recognized for some time that the meaning of a text -- particularly an old or obscure text-- is not often apparent, requires some work to interpret. I shall not go into the long and excellent hermeneutic tradition which is essentially German, beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher, who saw psychological intuition into a text as being an essential step in truly understanding it; and of course we need to mention Dilthey, the philosopher who would have us understand history as Weltanschauung--"world-view"; and it is not inappropriate to mention Martin Heidegger's brave explorations in Daseinanalysis as projections-in-history. But I instead would like to focus on Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, Second, Revised Edition, Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Continuum, New York, New York, 2003, pp.362-379. Here we are encouraged to borrow from a germ of an idea in R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography, Galaxy, Oxford, United Kingdom, 1970, p.70, to the effect that the meaning of a text is only found by understanding the answer to the question for which the text is an answer. Gadamer devolops this into a full-fledged protocol for analyzing texts, which is something that Oxford professor Collingwood does not do, but I find myself taking issue with Gadamer when I read him saying, "...we must remember that the question we are concerned to reconstruct has to do not with the mental experiences of the author but simply with the meaning of the text itself." I find this assertion too restrictive for what Collingwood really seems to be saying, and for what the very logic of the proposition vis a vis questions-and-answers seems to be taking us. In fine, I feel quite satisfied that the "questions-and-answers" method can be modified to infer mental states; and besides, there is so little semantic difference betwixt 'mental experiences' and 'meaning of the text' that this seems to be a case of hair-splitting.

So what shall I do? I shall get a copy of Collingwood's Autobiography and carve out my own method of question-and-answers upon a text which will permit psychological content analysis-- or any other type of plausible type of conclusion. In days gone by, I have read Collingwood, at this citation, and just moments ago from Amazon.com I ordered a 'very good' used edition from which I can carve my home-spun model for this work. I plan to use in in connection with the work of a linguist I have read of, and may read if I can get around to such a thing, the author Paul Grice, who writes about implicature... by which he seems to refer to those unspoken rules of communication that affect the message and the mode of the message in utterance. I shall not dwell on Grice's 'rules of implicature,' as these may be culturally specific and not applicable to the culture of Bible times. But it seems germane and in fact a 'hot idea' to reflect on ways in which the Gospels, say, particularly those containing Q [Matthew and Luke] operate according to unspoken 'rules.' I would say, from the outset, that among these rules are a veneration for 'tradition,' as well as a tendency to 'edit tradition,' particularly in ways to enhance a favorite theological view or to make sure that the audience regards Jesus as 'Messiah.' Sub-themes, which may be less-desirable, are the tendency to malign 'the Pharisees,' and in a more-subtle way the movement of John-Baptizer. This can be done point-by-point, using sound linguistic analysis techniques, and I think I can incorporate the question-and-answers method of Collingwood into Grice's notions of implicature into a viable psychological content analysis system applicable to the Bible. My special project will have been to work this in tandem with the blog on "Groping with the Language of Jesus: Aramaic/Hebrew," http://learningaramaic.blogspot.com, where I try to incorporate sociolinguistic data into a conservative linguistic reconstruction of the Jewish Aramaic of Q.

To this task, I have one other resource: Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social Semiotic Perspective, by M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 1990 (1985.) I realize that this book treats of text in a social way, not in a psychological mode, but I appreciate the rigor with which it attacks a text, and basically agree with its wisdom that any text needs absolutely to be understood from its cultural-context. I shall keep Halliday and Hasan at-hand and refer to them as the need arises in both these 'partner blogs,' for when psychology fails us, social-psychology is likely to step in upon the heels of sociology, as the systems expand larger and larger...

To summarize, I have tried to touch on both the positivist philosophy for using text-alone in psychological content analysis of the Bible. This 'scientific' approach is-- of course-- fine sounding-- but in practice one may have difficulty ascertaining the "who," "what," "where," "when," "how," and-- especially-- the "why" of a document/text, leading us to adopt measures like Schleiermacher's intuitionism or Collingwood/Gadamer's questions-and-answers. My thrust will be-- when I get essential reference material together and do sufficient creative synthesis-- to devise a method for using the questions-and-answers method [of Collingwood] to assess the implicatures of Bible languages... particularly Koine Greek re Q [ of Paul Grice's linguistics.]

The books are coming by United States Postal Service, and should be in within a couple of weeks. Between times I can think. I do not think this will be an impossible synthesis.

Focus on the "Data" of Bible Text Versus Bible Language, and Announcement Versus Hearsay Therein.

2006-01-11T00:14:00.000-08:00

For a few entries to come, I shall endeavor to project from the basic 'last' afforded by Klaus Krippendorff's brief summary, the "framework" of content analysis, with a view toward clarifying my own thoughts on what is required in my own work-- which does consist of 'reading' all kinds of texts including thoses of the N.T. and O.T. And in particular, of late, I have been focusing on the core problem of how to 'read' the 'mind' of Jesus of Nazareth from the welter of information-- in various stages of array and disarray-- that we have available to us from Apostolic Times.

In this entry, I want to elaborate upon Krippendorff's principle that "...[i]n any content analysis it must be clear which data are being analyzed, how they are defined, and from which population they are drawn." As this web-log is a 'sister' to the blog on "Groping with the Language of Jesus:Aramaic/Hebrew," http://learningaramaic.blogspot.com, the first thoughts that come to my mind naturally are about the Gospels as accounts in [Koine] Greek of Jesus' life... and as historical evidence they are at best, best, best only secondary sources for the teaching of Jesus [and John-Baptizer!] and not not primary resources. It is not completely fair to call the compilation of testimonies in the Gospels hearsay, but rather they would qualify as what a paleo-ethnographer might designate as being based on folk traditions, which has led some scholars to speculate that these traditions were in fact oral traditions.

This last point brings us to a reckoning that must be dealt with before we proceed further into work on this topic. From a textual standpoint, manifestly, the Evangelists are attempting something like 'holy biography,' hagiography, admittedly-- by their own attestation doing no more than passing on the supposed teachings of Jesus. For reasons that have to do with the sociology of Hellenistic times, these Gospels were written in Greek, a form of vulgarized Attic Greek that was called Koine ["common"] Greek; it was functionally like what Esperanto was supposed to have been some years back or English really is now for much of the world-- i.e. a language of the entire Roman Emire. I have read that in Britain trinkets and artifacts have been found with inscriptions from the Roman Period in Koine Greek, which would suggest that even in the westermost part of the Empire, Koine Greek was still the language of most commerce, leaving Latin as the tongue for the elite who governed in Rome. This is the first aspect of a linguistic problem which must be dealt with when considering the data-base at hand in the Gospels concerning Jesus [and John Baptizer... and all figures of the N.T.!]

The second great fork of this linguistic situation is the very real possibility that neither Jesus, nor the "disciples," nor the Baptizer and his movement, nor Paul, spoke Koine Greek as a first language-- with Paul of course being the likeliest candidate for fluency in the Koine to have penned the several epistles known to have been authentically his own. But dimmer prospects present themselves for the typical Palestinian in the 1st century to know Greek well-enough to be theologically/philosophically-conversant in it. I do not wish to let this assertion pass as 'fact' without some documentation to back it up, so I shall begin first with literature of which I know, and then resort to 'archeo-linguistic' data analysis of findings from around the time of Jesus in Palestine.

We come, in the Book of Acts, 21:40, 22:2, we find Paul speaking to the people of Jerusalem in hebraidi, which the NRSV translates as "Hebrew," with the alternative translation "Aramaic." If this is but a pious fiction, as a story about Paul, it may still reflect on a linguistic fact that people in Jerusalem -- if not in most of Palestine at the time-- spoke "Hebrew/Aramaic" and not Greek-- and certainly not Latin!

This last finding in isolation is only one piece of information. In reaching elsewhere, we find Josephus ending his Antiquities of the Jews 11:2:264, with, "...for our nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations, and so adorn their discourses with the smoothness of their periods; because they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to all sorts of freemen, but to as many of the servants as please to learn them. But they give him the testimony of being a wise man who is fully acquainted with our laws, which account, as there have been many who have done their endeavors with great patience to obtain this learning, there have yet hardly been so many as two or three that have succeeded therein, who were immediately well rewarded for their pains."
The statement would argue that language study was not as important as study of the Jewish law, and that few knew the languages of the Gentiles, which would include Greek and Roman. Apparently Aramaic-- which was so well-integrated from the Babylonian Captivity days-- was not considered a language of the Ethnoi!

Then we turn to the words of Jesus in supposed 'Galilean' Aramaic in the Gospels, with first the qualifiers that the fact that Jesus spoke some Aramaic in the Gospels would in no wise rule out his knowing some-- or a lot-- of Koine Greek as well. The historical method only gives us possiblilties-as-good-as-probabilities, not logical certainties. It would stand to plausiblity, though, that the high degree of cerebration reflected in the Jesus-Logia would require really high proficiency in Greek and one might be inclined to wonder whether in fact this was the case with the Nazarene or otherwise. At any rate, he did speak Aramaic at the following citations:

Matthew 27:46-- Eli Eli lema sabachthani-- "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Mark 15:34-- ElOi ElOi lema sabchthani-- "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The archeological evidence concerning the linguistic distribution in Palestine during the 1st century and what Jews call the Tannaitic Period [10-240 C.E.] is complicated by the fact that the Holy Land is 'disturbed soil' after so many generations of human use, including invasion, cultivation, construction, destruction, etc., etc.--- the general and predictable picture we might expect from land that is much-used and considered of utmost-importance by competing parties. At my attention, I have two works which shed light on this problem. The first, "Languages and Cultural Traditions," is Chapter 7, pp. 154-175, in Archeology, History, and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis, by Richard A. Horsley, Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1996. According to Horsley, "Most scholars of language history in the Hellenistic and Roman periods believe that, prior and parallel to the emergence of Judean literature in Aramaic, there were local versions of Aramaic spoken among the people in and around Palestine. The consensus is that some Palestinian form(s) of Aramaic was the most commonly sponken language in Palestine, outside of Palestine, outside of the (Hellenistic) cities, that the spoken language in Judea itself believe that Aramaic was a close second among the people there. In Galilee, Aramaic would have been the traditional spoken language of the people during Hellenistic times, continuing so after the Hasmoneans brought the area under Jersalem control. With the successive Ptolemaic and Seleucid administrations in Sepphoris (as indicated in the Zenon papyri) Greek replaced Aramaic as the language of administration, but eh traditional spoken language undoubtedly continued in everyday village life." [Page 163, ibid.] Horsley goes on to cite a survey of epigraphic evidence from 'Roman' Galilee [by Sean Freyne, Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian, 323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E.: A Study in Second Temple Judaism, Michael Glazier, Wilmington, Delaware, 1980, p.144], to the effect that at this time that of all epigraphic remains, 40% report Greek, 40% report Hebrew, and 50% report Aramaic. [Horsley brings up the distinct possibility that Michnaic Hebrew or its ilk may have been spoken! Therefore, the err on the side of caution, the title of the blog on the "language of Jesus" designates this as "Aramaic/Hebrew."]

So much fo Horsley. I have another work on archeology of the time in question, this for "Cave of Letters," pp. 47-52, from Jesus and His World: An Archeological and Cultural Dictionary, by John J. Rousseau and Rami Arav, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1995. The article relates to the Babatha Archive, which is a collection of 'legal' and business letters written in Greek and Aramaic and Nabatean found near the Dead Sea and appearing to date from the period around the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the final occasion when the Jews were defeated by the Roman in C.E. 135. This trove of letters seems to date to about 132. The author of this article seems to make much of the fact that Greek is the predominate language of the documents, but as a possessor of my own Volume 1 of this set of the Babatha Library, i.e. The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Edited by Naphtali Lewis, Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions, Edited by Yigael Yadin and Jonas C. Greenfield, Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, Israel, 1989-- I come away from these texts with a decidedly different, perhaps nuanced, perspective than that presented in Jesus and His World... Here's how:

It is true that the documents in the Babatha Archive/Library are mostly in Greek; they are legal documents prepared by a notary-like agent for the Empire called a 'librarius'-- whose role seems like unto the 'scribes' mentioned in the N.T. The Greek is vulgar Koine Greek, and shows much trend toward Semiticism. Aramaic and Nabatean subscription is witnessed in more than small abundance, especially in culturally-sensitive documents. It could be that the statement that one letter contains-- not in my volume so I have to quote from Jesus and His World.., p.50, that "[t]he letter is written in Greek as we have no one who speaks Hebrew..." could have referred to the Hebrew language-itself as opposed to Aramaic-- presumably much more widely spoken. In short, I see the Babatha Archive as presenting a picture of penetration of the Greek language into the affairs of government and of the ruling classes, but that the vernacular languages of Aramaic [and Nabatean] were very much alive and doing the business of the 'common people.' It seems quite clear from reading the Babatha Archive that Greek was only a language to which the masses turned in order to get the business of the agora and the Empire accomplished.

What does this mean with regard to psychological content analysis of-- in this instance at hand-- the mind of Jesus from the Greek text? We are left with a logical problem of sorts, for the Greek is at best only an indicator of what the Nazarene had to say, for I have-- I think for all but the hardest of hard-heads-- demonstrated that what you read in the Koine Greek-- in even the Greek of Q as The Critical Edition of Q, by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffman, and John S. Kloppenborg, Augsburg Fortress Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2000 so vigorously argues--- is not the language of Jesus, et al., et al. Now it would be attractive to invoke here the words 'form criticism' to refer to the 'something sociological-psychological beneath the text [the earliest versions of which are-- admittedly-- Greek, Greek, Greek], but that imposes a kind of language-game where Rudolph Bultmann and Martin Dibelius and German scholarship are too chauvinistically bandied about, when in fact I am trying to reach for a more-neutral, more-social-science cognate which would imply that TEXTS ARE BUT ARTIFACTS OF A PSYCHOSOCIAL SYSTEM, AND THE INDIVIDUAL 'BENEATH' A WRITTEN TEXT EMPLOYS SYMBOLS WHICH INTERFACE BETWEEN HER/HIS PERSONAL SYSTEM AND THE WELTANSCHAUUNG [WORLD-VIEW.] The sooner one comes to grips with the fact that the text-- as data-- is an indicator of a mind behind it and not the mind itself -- then some 'peace' can be made with the process of using a text as data. For the Gospels, quoting Jesus in Greek from a [possibly Galilean Aramaic] tradition decades-old hand-me-down piously, the value of the information of such 'indicators' may be open to some serious questioning that even rigorous use of the critical method can generate only 'maybes,' not 'certainties.'

Why Do Psycho-Content-Analysis of Bible Language?

2006-01-08T10:06:00.000-08:00

This web-log begins at a key juncture, chronologically and systemically, in the process of constructing a parallel blog, "Groping with the Language of Jesus: Aramaic/Hebrew," http://www.learningaramaic.blogspot.com. The thrust of this afore-mentioned blog is to elaborate on the ins-and-outs of all aspects of Aramaic dialect[s], particularly those bearing on the putative language of Jesus, which has been variously hypothesized as Galilean, Palestinean, or simply 1st-century Jewish Aramaic... or even a variant of Hebrew, depending on which reference one reads; at the same time the web-log makes clear that every 'original' word that we associate with Jesus is in Greek, not these Semitic tongues, so linguistic-reconstruction must be utilized to fathom what the 'original' MIGHT have been 'off the lips' of Rabbi Jesus.

These are the sorts of problems that this web-log will focus-upon. The literature on content analysis is extensive, and considered good science; it is especially useful for examining psycholgical states. I have one book at my attention on content analysis, this by Klaus Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, 1980, a book which is long on talk about what to do with a computer on textual analysis, but short when it comes to talk about going-for-psychological-depth in content analysis. Perhaps with wishful thinking, I just ordered Ole R. Holsti's Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanitie, Addison-Wesley-Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts, 1969, for its title-- frankly-- and for its good references from the Boolean logic search of University of Louisville Libraries-- and for its mentionings in Krippendorff.

Krippendorff devotes about three pages that are germane to psychological content analysis as a specific form of study. Nevertheless, the points he makes in his "framework" for content analysis can be taken in every single psychological content analysis. Here are his points:

Any [psychological] content analysis must be clear which data are analyzed. A corollary to this is that-- when dealing with a Biblical text-- we are never ever dealing with speech but at best perhaps a poor artifact of speech. We must also be careful about who may be doing the real utterance-- a factor we so often have to fret with the 'sanctiers' who wished to put 'Jesus-words' into the N.T. Etc. Etc.
In any [psychological] content analysis, the context relative to which data are analyzed must be made explicit. In other words, this goes against the grain of a deconstructionist interpretation ; or the modern concepts of linguistic "discourse analysis," [which utilizes minimal contextual reading in its workings.] What we are finding here instead is a substantial basis for understanding hearkening backward to the theory of interpretation of Friedrich Schleiermacher, cf. Hermeneutics and Criticism And Other Writings, Translated and Edited by Andrew Bowie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1998, which stresses "...one must take care to go back to the original context to avoid mistakes that arise from taking sentences in isolation."[Editor's summary!]
In any [psychological] content analysis, the aim or target of the inferences must be clearly stated. In other words, we must clearly define whether our inference are as recipients of-- say-- a 1st century audience receiving a rather casual pastoral letter from Paul to the Thessalonians-- perhaps unlikely to have been regarded as "Scripture"-- or whether we should regard ourselves as a target audience with 'thinking caps' as well as 'crosses-on-our-lapels'-- willing to serve with head and heart. It is important to meditatate on the thought that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but no one is entitled to his own facts...'Faith without smarts is a non-starter' [My paraphrase of Luke 14:28.] This target is located in the 'variable portion of the context of the available data,' according to Krippendorff. We must clearly distinguish-- in other words-- to whom the 'author' is addressing. An audience of the 21st century in a 21st century context first of all needs to understand the context and world-view of the 'messenger,' his 'audience,' and the 'environment,' and if this goes back to the Hellenistic Mediterranean world of 1st century Palestine, we need to make as many changes as we can relevant to the task of psychological understanding.
In any [psychological] content analysis, the task is to make inferences from data to certain aspects of their context and to justify these inferences in terms of the knowledge about the stable factors in the system of interest...A theory of these relationships that is formulated so that the data appear as its independent variables and the target variables appears in its dependent variables is called an ANALYTICAL CONSTRUCT...An analytical construct serves as the logical bridge between available data and the uncertain target in their context. In other words, the analytic construct is the 'hypothesis' or 'theory' that we can bring to bear on a certain set of linguistic data, from which we would like to draw a psychological profile.

This is a useful model, as far as it goes. But I have been working with the text of Q-- one example of Bible text from which psychlogical profiling can be done--and I as a person who likes to express his imagination in a scientific idiom will not be satisfied without stipulating the limitations to some of this type of research. In Q, for example, we have at bottom only Koine Greek as our earliest witness, plus a near-universal recognition that the first language of Jesus must have been either Aramaic or a form of Hebrew. While linguistic-reconstruction is far from being an arbitrary discipline, it leaves the scholar with a piece-meal, word-per-word interpolation-- when it is done best-- which is to say when it is done with utmost caution.

Also, textual variation can make a scholar throw up his hands in despair, trying to ascertain which 'version' gets at the truest 'meaning' of an author of a Biblical text. This is especially true of the New Testament, which has seen 'the good, the bad, and the ugly' intude upon it unto the advent of printing and afterward; in a way the welter of new translations of Scripture parallels the welter of confusion that existed prior to the printing press. So I suppose, the welter will never in the end cease from 'weltering'...

Language itself is subject to a factor known as linguistic drift, which means that over time, given the buffeting of economics, politics, current events, and all exigencies in time, all languages change and evolve. The meanings the 1st century Christians and Jews gave to religious language will naturally have changed by common parlance in 2006. But the crucial message of psychological content analysis [which will also be called 'psychological profiling through text'] is that we need to restore -- in the most valid and most-lucid way-- the 'message,' the 'context,' and 'the audience' in order to ascertain the 'mind of the messenger'a behavioral psychologist might object to the choice of 'mind' as a word but one of the newer 'cognitive' psychologists certainly would do no such thing!]

My plan for this blog is to 'run' it parallel to "Groping with the Language of Jesus:Aramaic/Hebrew," http://www.learningaramaic.blogspot.com, principally to highlight psycholinguistic insights for the inputs already there, but in a larger sense too for the frequent instances when I am inclined to attempt-- as an amateur-with-a-flair-for-language-analysis-- such work. And in the final instance, I may use the Bible-- a big book and many including me would say a Good Book in places--with many possibilities for language study--as a springboard for learning and developing skills in psychological content analysis.