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7:45 AM

Q: Why did Adrammelech and Sharezer suddenly kill their father King Sennacherib?

In Isaiah 37, King Sennacherib tries to destroy the Northern two-tribe Kingdom, but Jehovah protects them from the Assyrian empire. King Sennacherib returns to Assyria, begins bowing down to his god Nisrock, but then is all of a sudden killed by his two sons. It seems to be difficult to find mu...

isaiah

^^^ Is this answerable? It seems to me like it should be, but a comment indicates otherwise and I know so little about the political context of Isaiah that I don’t even know whether it’s a reasonable question.

5 hours later…

Davïd

12:23 PM

@Susan My take: the question isn't a "biblical studies" one. There is a loose association with Isaiah, of course, but this is neither the context nor the basis for an answer. People do make a career of Assyriology, and it often has little contact with biblical texts.

1 hour later…

Susan

1:36 PM

@Davïd Makes sense, thanks. Could I convince you to vote accordingly?

1 hour later…

Susan

2:47 PM

I wonder if it would be on topic at History.SE.

@ThaddeusB Grammar?

I might call it referent-identification.

authorial-intent is another one of those tags I can't really get my head around. Isn't pretty much everything?

ThaddeusB

@Susan I put grammar on it because of the "plural" vs "singular" aspect. referent-identification would work equally well... I do agree that authorial-intent is one of the those that could apply to most questions. I put in on things where is it explicitly asked "Was the author trying to do X?"

Susan

@ThaddeusB Yeah, I kind of realized where you were coming from after I wrote that. It's not exactly a nuanced grammatical distinction, and the question doesn't really hinge on that (rather, assumes it), but singular and plural are grammatical concepts....ok.

And yes, emendation, thank you. I guess we're considering that a subset of textual-criticism then? There had been some chattering in here at some point that left me with the impression that maybe text criticism requires manuscript support, but maybe not.

Although I guess that wouldn't always be a straightforward distinction anyway, if mss in other languages count.

Can somebody explain to me what it is we're doing when we make plurals by duplication of the last consonant of an abbreviation? Based on the distribution of such things I'd think it was Latin or something, but AFAIK (and I really don't), Latin doesn't make plurals like that.

ThaddeusB

3:32 PM

@Susan I think it is (mostly) a subset of textual-criticism, yes, but could be mistaken. Certainly it is mostly the same experts doing both.

Q: Have any ante-Nicene writings been discovered in the past 20 years?

Have an writings or fragments of ante-Nicene Church Fathers previously unknown (that is the actual words were not known, not necessarily that the name of the work was also previously unknown) to modern readers been discovered within the last 20 years or so? If not, when was the last time such a ...

church-history church-fathers archaeology christian-literature

^^ Posted here because not on-topic at BH, but perhaps more likely to get an expert response from this crowd than the general C.SE crowd

Susan

4:12 PM

@ThaddeusB Just for my own clarity....is it is safe to say that textual-emendation will not (ever?) apply to questions of NT texts (because - basically- the ms evidence is too good)?

(Presuming that we're considering "emendations" to be of the conjectural type. Any other definition would seem to be nonsensical for NT where everybody (ha!) seems to buy into an eclectic text.)

@ThaddeusB Interesting. Seems like there may be a question-behind-the-question there. ?

Nathaniel

4:29 PM

@Susan Great question: I don't see that asked anywhere on ELU, so if you don't ask it there I might :)

Susan

@Nathaniel I've been considering doing that for a while....but not sure if it's real English or just academia-talk. ;-) Google didn't provide a ready answer. Welcome to the library, BTW. Not sure if I've seen you talking in here before.

Nathaniel

@Susan Thanks! Yes, it's my first comment here, but I've been lurking for a bit. I'd say it's real English, considering we use "pp." as plural for pages (see here; the answers don't deal with the why).

ThaddeusB

@Susan Certainly rare, but not entirely unheard of, for an unattested reading to be proposed. For example, one (not so common, but in my opinion not without merit) solution to resolving the genealogies of Jesus is to assume Matthew originally read "Joseph, father of Mary" instead of "Joseph, husband of Mary" and a scribe "corrected" it at a very early date

@Susan Sort of. I am interested in the history of manuscript discoveries for its own sake (last 20 years was completely arbitrary), but am also interested in whether the chance of ever rediscovering some famous lost writings is 0.0% or more accurately >0% but <1%.

Susan

4:49 PM

@ThaddeusB Oh interesting! That's the sort of thing I was wondering about. I see it was mentioned on one of our Q&As, but I had either not read it or forgot.

6 hours later…

Davïd

10:46 PM

@ThaddeusB You could try asking Roger Pearse -- he seems to have his finger on this pulse.

ThaddeusB

11:06 PM

@Davïd Thanks, I'll give it a try.

Davïd

11:42 PM

@Susan @Nathaniel There is a crumb of info on EL&U. FWIW.

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