Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Peter Kirk, responding to Henry Churchyard's post of this name, wrote:

>Thank you for taking the time to look this one up. (How about this for 
>evidence for the dating of Genesis, Ian?) 

It would suggest that Genesis was written prior to Ezra, but I don't think
there's much debate about that. In fact, Giovanni Garbini trashes the
Persian chancelry Aramaic of Ezra (and Daniel) as being poor attempts at
archaism by people who couldn't use the necessary dialect and who almost
certainly wrote well after the period. The book we know as Ezra is so late
Josephus didn't know it, using instead 1Esdras, which in its Hebrew original
was probably the source for Ezra.

>Presumably such evidence is 
>good only for the Hebrew dialect and pronunciation of the LXX 
>translators, 

What actually was translated by the seventy? I posted earlier the
possibility of only a form of Deuteronomy as the book of Moses. Translations
that have come to be collected under the title of LXX probably stretched out
for a few centuries. Ezra being late was obviously translated later.

>which may have been quite odd; for it seems to me that 
>their mother tongue was Greek and their understanding of Hebrew and 
>vocalisation of the text was often quite deficient. But that's another 
>discussion...

Translation as an art makes an interesting study. We do learn a lot about
pronunciation in the process of transliterating words into another language.
There are a number of reasons for difficulties in transliteration: besides
the lack of knowledge of the original language, there is also lack of good
knowledge of the target language and phonological constraints in the target
language.


Ian