Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ken Litwak <kdlitwak AT concentric.net>]

Since there have been continuing discussion on this list of
historical issues, there are two points brought up by some posters that
I think it would be useful to address.  I'll only do one here.  It is
the assertion by some that the texts of the Scriptures of Israel come
from the 2nd century BCE, and numerous arguments about context and
history have been based upon this assertion.  So, from the perspective
of historical research, what can we say?

1.  We can first that there are MSS available to us which date from the
3rd century BCE forward (I think it can reasonably be argued that
multiple DSS likely date from the 3rd century BCE, not just the 2nd
century BCE).  So we can fix the dates of most of the documents to no
later than the 3rd or 2nd century BCE. 

2. To set the terminus ad quem in this way, however, tells us little if
anything about the actual dates of composition of these texts.  If we
were to base the dating of the autographs upon the earliest copies of
the texts, then we would be forced to date the _composition) of
virtually every single Latin and Greek text, whose authors are generally
attributed to the classical period, to the Middle Ages. There are no 3rd
century BCE copies of Aristotle or Plato.  There is no fourth century
BCE copy of Herodotus.  Virgil, Thucydides, Aristotle, Tacitus, and all
the rest, are known to us at the earliest from texts from the MIddle
Ages.  Is there anyone who wants to seriously mount an argument that
Aristotle's Rhetorica was composed in the 8th century AD, simply because
the earliest known text is from around then?  So we may safely set aside
the age of the MS as having much relevance to dating the text _unless_
we can show that the MS is also the autograph.  We may reasonably date
papyrus grocery lists in this fashion, for the odds of anyone
reproducing them are low IMO, but this would not apply to literary
works.  

3.  We may then have to look at the contents of the text, and successor
texts which depend upon a given intertext, to relatively date the
former.   This is a difficult area.  One person will find parallels to
Persian or Hellenistic culture.  Another person will find parallels in
Egyptian culture that could not have been known in the time of the
Persian empire.  One needs to establish criteria for being able to state
that an apparent similarity is an actual cultural dependence.  The only
criterion in that case that I can think of are parallels to phenomena
which would have been relevant at one point in time but not before a d
probably not after.  So, for example, a text, if it explicitly referred
to Herod the Great's palace, could not presumably, if meant to be merely
an account of it, not come from a time before Herod existed.  On the
other hand, if a text records something incidentally, which would not
have been true at a alter time, then it may be reasonable to date that
text's origins to the tie period in which those incidental facts were
valid.  I remember reading a couple of years ago an article in BAR on
Egyptian parallels to Genesis which would have ONLY been true or
meaningful in the 2nd millennium BCE, and would not have been true for
well over a millennium by the 2nd century BCE.  THus, by the criteria I
would use, that material cannot have come from the 2nd century BCE but
must be from the 2nd millennium BCE. This presumes the correct
identification of these facts in Egyptian records.  

  I welcome discussion of this issue except I am not interested in a)
flippant responses, of which I have received many lately, and b)
responses that wish to challenge my view but not provide their own
criteria for adjudicating issues.  In other words, I'm interested in
scholarly discussion of historiography, not assertions that assume
historical method without ever justifying that method.  

Ken Litwak
Trinity College/University of Bristol
Bristol, England