ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #42 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Why do the events in the second part of the poem, which seemed to be about the future, sound as if they are being described as happening in the past? >> Well, Eric, I was wondering if anybody would notice that. Here you stumbled on an issue that illustrates sort of the limits of what we can do in terms of exegesis when we're working on the basis of a translation alone. The problem that arises here is how to handle the translation of certain Hebrew verb forms in both parts of the poem, both in the first part of the poem and in the second part of the poem. Because what we have here -- and we'll focus on the second part of the poem because that's where the problem is the biggest. But what we have here are some verb forms that are normally translated as past tense forms talking about things that happened in the past that in this context have to be talking about things that happen in the future. Well, I'm not going to go into any great detail about Hebrew verbs here. But let me just summarize by saying that while one of the two major parts of the Hebrew verb is commonly used for the past and the other is commonly used for the future, the fact is that when you look at all of their usage together, you find that both types of Hebrew verb forms are used of the past and both are used of the future. Now, the past use of the one is the predominant. And it's less often used of the future. And of the other, the future is the predominant and it's less often used of the past. But they are both used to describe both past events and future events. And that's one of the things that makes translating Hebrew so fun. Really. I promise. Well, okay, back to the text, though. So really the timeframe of a Hebrew verb, whether you're talking about past or future, is determined not completely by its form as it might be in Greek or Latin or English. But also by its use in the context. And perhaps we should say especially by its use in the context. Now, when we look at this poem and everything that the poem says, it's clear from the context that there's a shift in the time being discussed after Verse 12. And some English translations, maybe even most of the English translations, don't do a very good job of dealing with this problem. In fact, to be honest, this issue is tied to an even larger debate about when this poem was written and who wrote it. Historical critical scholars who reject Moses as the author of the poem used the past tense verb forms, the -- in the latter part to argue that this poem must have been written at a much later time after Israel had settled into Canaan and probably even after the temple had been built in Jerusalem. So that they then wrote the poem later and they sort of invented a situation to stick it in the mouth of Moses, you know, earlier in the poem. And they pretended that Moses sang this song when it was actually written hundreds of years after the fact. So how would we respond to that kind of critique of the poem? I think we would have to respond in this way: By pointing out that as Hebrew and -- Hebrew grammar and Hebrew syntax is used -- and conservatives and liberals all recognize this -- that the tense or time of a Hebrew verb depends more on the context than it does on the form. And if we analyze this poem with a view to determining, you know, when the events are talking about, we find that up to Verse 12 they are talking about past events. Up from Verse 13 on they are talking about future events. And we have to let that be our guide as we translate the verb forms rather than just the forms themselves. But Eric, as you pointed out, sometimes when you read English translations, they haven't done an all together good job of this. And so some of the things in the poem that are about the future are sometimes described using past tense verb forms in the English translation. And as a result, that can be a little confusing when you're reading in detail. The casual reader probably doesn't notice. But you know, since you're reading the text carefully, it leapt off the page at you that there was something a little odd about this. And the answer as you can see is a little more complicated than we can deal with here in this class. But it's part of a bigger problem. And one that in this case we can solve by understanding the context of the verb forms correctly. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***