[b-hebrew] The Priestly Stratum - dating by language
Søren Holst
sh at teol.ku.dk
Thu Feb 27 03:02:18 EST 2003
Yigal Levin wrote:
> So that "late" language does not rule out
> "early" composition, which was then "updated" by a later copyist
>
it's a lot more fun to argue that there's something we know - than the
opposite. So I'll try to keep this brief:
What Yigal says above is obviously true, but presupposes that we actually
know how to distinguish between "late" and "early" language.
There's no doubt that the language of Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles is
slightly but consistently different from that of Genesis-Kings. Whether this
difference is necessarily a difference of time of composition remains
disputed. The two "sorts" of Hebrew might have been in use at the same time.
If (and only IF) this was the case, not only could a text in "late" language
have been authored in an "early" period as indicated by Yigal, but the
contrary is also possible: A text written in the Hebrew of Genesis-Kings
could have been authored late. The only way to demonstrate that this is
actually possible, would be to show that a text who talks about events in
the Persian period is actually written in the same sort of Hebrew as
Genesis-Kings. Precisely this, Danish scholar Martin Ehrensvärd has done in
his recently defended ph.d. thesis (analyzing texts like Haggai, Malachi and
Zecharaiah and finding no more features of "late" Biblical Hebrew in them
than in, say, the Books of Samuel). The relevant parts of the dissertation
are due out as an article in a volume edited by Ian Young (sorry, I can't
find the title).
kol tuv
Soren
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