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  • From: "Thomas L. Thompson" <tlt AT teol.ku.dk>
  • To: "'peter_kirk AT sil.org'" <peter_kirk AT sil.org>, Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: SV: Re[6]: Melchizedek (More Dave) (Peter's response)
  • Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 11:35:33 +0100


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)



  • SV: Re[6]: Melchizedek (More Dave) (Peter's response), Thomas L. Thompson, 01/03/2000

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