Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jonathan Bailey <jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de>]

I am wondering what people who hold to the traditional datings of the corpus 
of LBH
do to support their positions. For instance, how do those who believe that 
Solomon
wrote Ecclesiates and Song of Songs look at the unique language of those 
books?
The liberal community would call them "late". What to the traditionalists do?

Is there a certain unity in the language of the "late" books that are agreed 
upon being
late, such as Chronicles and Esther which cannot be reconciled with a certain 
unity
between the books of Ecclesiates and Song of Songs (if indeed any of these 
books
have such a unity).

I am aware that LBH is hardly a unified language, and that Chronicles and Job 
are
quite different. How do the liberals account for such differences in the 
language of the
various "late" books if their explanation for everything is that they share a 
common
time frame?

Could a possible explanation be that certain of the OT books were translated 
from
other semitic languages into Hebrew at an exilic/post-exilic date? Could Job 
have
been translated from the Edomite of the supposed environment of Job or the 
South
West Semitic of Jethro into Hebrew at about the same time that Ecclesiastes 
and
Song of Solomon were translated from an Aramaic or other North West Semitic
dialect, say during the reform of Esra, thereby explaining the many 
differences among
these books while accounting for the many later features. Of course such an 
idea
would have to be supported by a common language of the "late" works of 
Solomon,
and Esra, Nehemia, Chronicles, and perhaps Esther would have to be of a very 
similar
language.

Can someone tell me of the Hebrew sections of Daniel? It is claimed to be one 
of the
last books of the bible, but to my knowledge, the Hebrew is not too "late" in
appearance. Am I correct here? Can someone give me a decent overview of 
Daniel's
Hebrew in terms of the diachronic scale? Or perhaps other idiosyncracies of 
it?




Jonathan Bailey
MA Kandidat
Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
Heidelberg