Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Thomas L. Thompson" <tlt AT teol.ku.dk>]

Dear Peter,
        I find some real problems with the way the question about the
historical context of biblical composition is posed: especially when dealing
with it on such  a large scale as your outline does.
        For example Wellhausen (your #2) oriented his questions in regard to
establishing a history of Israel and a context for developing a history of
religious thought. One of the difficulties of the approach which developed
is not so much the lack of 'evidence' as you put it, as the lack of a
dependable history so that he could talk about what that 'pre-exilic'/
'exilic'/'post-exilic' period in fact was; or indeed what historical
referenced world those numbers (8-4th cent. evoked).
        I came into the question of dating biblical narratives from my
various positive reconstructions of the history of Palestine, when I started
asking about what kind of context was implied by the understanding of the
world and of the past given in our texts: especially the assumptions implied
by authorial self-understanding of 'Israel' (your #1).
        One last note: my 2nd century is a dating ad quem, and I usually am
discussing the dating of the Hebrew Bible as known from the massoretic
tradition; not of potentially earlier forms (such as the David story as
implied by the headings in the psalter).
Thomas

Thomas L. Thompson
Professor, University of Copenhagen


        [Thomas L. Thompson]  Peter Kirk wrote: 
> To oversimplify, there are three main hypotheses around for the 
> composition of the bulk of the Hebrew Bible as we know it:
> 
> 1) The Copenhagen approach, if I may correctly so call it, that most 
> was written in the 2nd century BCE, or not long before;
> 
> 2) The traditional scholarly approach of dating books over a range 
> from roughly the 8th to the 4th century;
> 
> 3) The evangelical approach, attributing the Pentateuch to Moses and 
> dating other books as more-or-less contemporary records.
> 
> The 
> problem to me is that I have not seen any real evidence for approach 
> 1)