Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

shalom thomas,

on rainey's reviews, 
i was thinking of 
rainey in J.A.O.S. 115 '95(?) on davies . . .

and rainey, in Association Jewish Studies Review 20.1 (1995) 156-160 on T.
Thompson ...

granted the linguistic chronologies are relative, they also put major
chunks of material into the first temple period and in relatively good,
'clean', shape. such stratified data are not predicted by those such as
davies who would date 'everything' 3-6th centuries BCE. see below.

glad to hear you spent some time with avi. 
(davies came through the year before for a damascus doc fest, too.)

avi has written a review article of davies, "The Historical Quest for
'Ancient Israel" and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some
Methodological Observations" in VT 47 (1997) 301-315.

"his statements [davies-rb] 'there is extraordinarily little by way of
external control on the dating of "classical Hebrew" ', and that  'we have
very few non-biblical texts by which to date the evolution of the language
in which the biblical literature is written'   are far from being
accurate."(evaluation by hurvitz, p. 307)

"we [hurvitz-rb] have, therefore, to conclude that 'classical BH' is a
well-defined linguistic stratum, indicative of a (typologically)
distinctive phase within biblical literature and a (chronologically)
datable time-span within biblical history--notwithstanding davies'
assertion to the contrary."(p. 309)

"however, the evidence presented above conclusively demonstrates that none
of these options [davies' options--rb] prevails in our biblical texts;
instead, what we have is a clear-cut distribution pattern which may be
accounted for satisfactorily only in chronological terms."(p.313)
"I leave all the other aspects of Davies's work--historical,
archaeological, theological, etc. -- to experts in these matters.  As far
as I can see, many of the critiques published so far on these aspects of
his work are not more favourable than the present one."(p. 314)

braxot
randall buth