Talk:Sefer (Hebrew)

Essentially you just said that any religious book believed to be holy is holy. A silly truism and nothing more. Danny

You know what I meant. If you feel that it is not said properly, reword it in a way that I will find acceptable. Ezra Wax

No, the Wikipedia project does not have to be acceptable to you. If anything, try and reword it in such a way that it is acceptable to other people, or else they will keep removing it. Danny


 * Ezra, with comments like that you aren't making friends among the neutrals here.

Actually, I have no problem with its removal. I thought he simply defaced the page like he did before. Ezra Wax

I added a link to Biblical Canon, an article that I believe addresses this issue:


 * Holy books are books whose religious authority is unquestioned. A book that may have been controversial in the past, can have its controversies resolved and become Holy.


 * The Talmud quotes controversies surrounding some of the books of Tanach and explains how they were resolved.

in a non-tautological and informative way. Therefore, I cut the above stuff. I also deleted the following:


 * It should be noted that the meaning of sefer, like that of book, has changed with time, as books were originally written in manuscript form and on scrolls.

because it seems trivial. My Hebrew is awfully fuzzy, but I have a vague recollection that the root for sefer is much like the English word "account" and is related to counting. Perhaps a better translation of Sefer into English is story or account. In any case, I do not think that the Hebrew word itself requires a particular form (bound, floio, or scroll). I would have no objection to adding to the article the sentence, "A sefer may be hand-written or printed; in scroll, folio, or bounded form" although that really just sounds trivial to me. Slrubenstein

You're right, of course. The root consonants, S.P.R., actually mean cut (this still exists in the Hebrew word for barber sappar), transformed to count (something to do with how numbers were once marked), then got to mean telling over (sippur is story), which evolved into book. Danny

This is ridiculous. We need to stop Ezra Wax's campaign to turn Wikipedia into a Hebrew and Yiddish dictionary. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Consider this a vote to delete this non-article. --RK

I agree. Wikipedia is not a dictionary and we also tend to title things in English. Isn't there a stub Hebrew wiki that needs some attention? --mav 19:30 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

While I have no problem per se with having hebrew title when there is no english equivant, I don't think that this article has anything to say. It should be deleted. Jon513 09:21, 10 April 2006 (UTC)