Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk"<peter_kirk AT sil.org>]

Dear Thomas,

My apologies, I did not intend to imply that this was a shared 
conclusion. I should have written "my conclusion", rather than "the 
conclusion".

In this context, I am using "pre-exilic" in the widely accepted 
conventional sense of before the deportations of 597 and 587 BCE. But 
of course I should not use the abbreviation "BCE" because the 
Christian era must have started before the death of Herod in 4 BCE. On 
the other hand, there are conventions.

I wonder if you can point me to any other examples of two separate 
religious groups accepting the same holy books, except for cases where 
they have inherited this acceptance from a time when the groups were 
united. If not, your argument depends on a historically unique 
situation in which always separate, or long separate, Judean and 
Samaritan sects accepted as holy and definitive the same corpus of 
newly written literature. To me, it would be highly surprising for one 
sect to accept such a set of newly written literature with an 
artificial history, and nothing short of miraculous for two warring 
sects to independently accept the same set of literature! And I 
remember what your colleague NPL had to say about historical 
explanations relying on miracles.

My feeling is that you would be on much safer ground to argue that 
there was a period of reconciliation and something close to unity 
between Judea and Samaria at some stage after the division attested in 
the Elephantine documents but before the start of the Christian era.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: SV: Evidence for pre-exilic Pentateuch
Author:  <tlt AT teol.ku.dk> at Internet 
Date:    18/01/2000 12:28


Dear Peter,
    To avoid any misunderstanding, I feel it necessary to point out that
what you refer to as the 'conclusion' of our exchange is not shared by me at 
all. Why you think a common corpus of holy books is evidence for early unity 
(of Jews and Samaritans) I can not imagine. Nor have you given any reasons 
for asserting that there was a 'division' or 'split' at any time: early or 
late. Finally, 'pre-exilic' is not an historically univocal term. 
Deportations from Palestine began as early as the 19th. cent. bce! 
Deportations to Mesopotamia are known beginning already in the 8th. cent. I 
do not consider Genesis as early in relationship to the rest of the 
Pentateuch. Although I do see the Pentateuch tradition as relatively early 
in relation to the rest of the Bible, there are many reasons not to press 
this date too early (See here Van Seters for a start).
Thomas
> With TLT's permission I am forwarding the following to the list. Note 
> the conclusion, contrary to Walter Mattfeld's, that the Pentateuch
> including Genesis is pre-exilic.
> To me, acceptance of a common corpus of holy books is good evidence of 
> some kind of early unity. Later, certainly by 1st century CE, there
> was division. That implies to me some kind of split, at some stage. At 
> any rate, we must consider at what point the books were first accepted 
> in Judea and in Samaria, and it seems unlikely that this would have
> happened at a time when the two groups were in fierce opposition to 
> each other.
>
>