Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Thank you, Ian, for your description of the redaction process. I fully 
accept that later redactors may have made changes like making names 
more acceptable e.g. Eshbaal to Ishbosheth, some obsolete people name 
to Philistines etc. But that is irrelevant to the point I was making, 
which is that it is at least possible that the original sources (or 
some of them) were written not long after some of the events they 
describe. To that I would add a corrollary that at least some part of 
the informaton in those original sources has come down to us not 
completely corrupted - and if you deny that, you deny all of the 
criteria for distinguishing sources and undermine the whole 
documentary hypothesis.

Peter Kirk