Nomadic Scribes?
Ian Hutchesson
mc2499 at mclink.it
Fri Jan 15 05:16:18 EST 1999
Dear John,
Thanks for your continuing interest in the subject.
>> I really can't understand the importance that a datum fit what the
>>biblical stories mention. Is it, well they got this one bit right, so
>>all the rest must basically be right as well?
Let me explain: I did not feel that it was necessary to look at that datum
at the time: the indication of perhaps well maybe a dry river bed is
actually one of the four rivers. (I am acquainted with David Rohl's
demostration that the four rivers of the garden were in the border area of
Turkey/Iran. So somebody else says something else. Another person of course
will have some other explanation.) I could go further into this (eg
"Looking for Dilmun", G.Bibby), but one datum in itself doesn't help the
argument I perceived you were making.
(BAR after all is in the business of making money and has few scholarly
restrictions.)
>No, if you recall, the point under discussion (which you said you wanted
>to get back to) was whether it was possible that bronze
>age traditions could have been handed down in written form to the
>Israelites by their forefathers. To show that such is possible, it is
>not necessary to show that "all the rest must be basically right". The
>"datum" under discussion was from the early bronze age.
Hopefully we aren't going to get bogged down with this. That one datum
found in the Hebrew early tradition possibly being correct doesn't indicate
that there was a continuous tradition that this datum is representative of.
With the one datum you cannot establish a tradition for you cannot
establish a trajectory for that datum that is necessarily through a Hebrew
tradition from the early bronze, ie such a datum could have been derived
from other sources at any time. I can't see that it helps you.
>I take it
>you are now admitting it is possible but are just trying to change the
>subject? Or do you have another explanation? And if they knew such
>minutiae from the early bronze age, isn't it possible they also knew who
>the early inhabitants of Gerar were related to (you certainly don't).
>
>> . . .
>> The walls of Jericho put all this theorising to rest. Jericho was
>>abandoned before the late bronze period, with few traces of anything
>>later.
>
>This abandonment is theorized on the basis of pottery finds and tomb
>abandonment, so your argument is circular here, since both Garstang and
>Kenyon found plenty of LB I pottery,
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