Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Lloyd,

Good to hear from you again! (Though maybe not so good in terms of 
distraction from my real work!)

I will take the risk of being accused of flunking my qualifying exams 
(I don't think that's a very nice way to present an argument) and 
comment on one or two points.

There is one way in which the books known as the Hebrew Bible have a 
unity and coherence independent of any religious ideas about it, but 
from  purely linguistic viewpoint. For these books are almost the 
entire corpus of known literature in a language which you could call 
"Classical Hebrew" if you don't like the name "Biblical Hebrew". From 
a purely linguistic viewpoint, we should add the book of Sirach and 
the limited number of inscriptions from the period (the exact 
boundaries may be debatable). But on this basis it is academically 
defensible quite apart from any theological premises to study the 
Hebrew Bible as a unity.

You wrote: "The situation can be made sense of only by one conclusion: 
our semi-lost civilization still remains buried in Palestinian soil.  
No other conclusion is possible." I wish I could agree. I agree that 
that civilisation existed. But unfortunately its material traces could 
have been lost forever by erosion, decay etc. But I agree, keep 
looking! There is probably something more out there to be found.

I am writing mainly to take issue with what you say about genre. I 
could write a lot on this. But I will restrict myself to this: You 
wrote, "Upon inspection, it is clear that imagination has dominated 
the portrayal and that the intent is not to provide the 'facts.'" I 
consider this far from clear. We have many example of imaginative 
literature from ancient times which are generally full of supernatural 
features which makes this very clear. But the great majority of the 
Biblical stories (the Exodus and Elijah-Elisha stories are exceptions, 
but even there to a limited extent) are remarkably free from 
supernatural features, but they are also often full of profound 
insights into the personalities of their central figures. These 
narratives could be the anachronistic works of great novelists; or 
they could be apparently anachronistic records of what these figures 
were actually like and of how they actually reacted to the events 
which surrounded them. Well, the argument "this piece cannot belong to 
genre X because genre X is unknown elsewhere" is logically fallacious; 
any genre may be unique, as we can tell simply from the fact that the 
first example of every genre was unique when it was first composed 
(and that is quite apart from the fact that many other examples of a 
genre may have been lost). So I think we have to conclude that the 
narrative parts of the Hebrew Bible belong to a genre not attested, or 
not well attested, elsewhere, and that means that all preconceptions 
are off limits as far as the truth or otherwise of the statements 
found in these narratives. I am not trying to argue for the verbatim 
accuracy of words quoted, but that the authors (contemporaries or near 
contemporaries) were intending to record or reconstruct an accurate 
picture of the life and deeds of the great figures they describe. 
Sounds perhaps rather too like a modern biography. But is there any 
hard evidence for anything else?

Peter Kirk