Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Niels Peter Lemche <npl AT teol.ku.dk>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rolf Furuli [SMTP:furuli AT online.no]
> Sent: Saturday, 22 January, 2000 14:07
> To:   Biblical Hebrew
> Subject:      Re: "Post-Exilic"  Genesis (long)
> 
> Rolf Furuli wrote among other things
> 
> The approaches of Walter, Niels, and your own approach are all sound and
> scientifc (though it seems that Niels is the more critical towards his own
> results). Each of you have made a good case for your supposed date of
> biblical books, but all the cases build upon much *reasoning* /and
> negative
> evidence/ (e.g. "Had Genesis been written in the 5th century or later, one
> would have expected mention of Persia in the List of Nations in Gen. 10.
> Since Persia arises in the mid 6th century BCE, therefore Genesis, or at
> least Gen. 10, must predate the mid-6th century BCE.), and this reasoning
> is built upon ussumptions which are built upon assumptions. Nothing wrong
> with that, but it should be admitted that the conclusions are not better
> than these assumptions!
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  Rolf, you may be right about this but the
issue is that critical scholarship--all sides of it have seen most of the
arguments pro et contra before and know in which context they may have
turned up. So when a certain argument reappears (not forgetting, of course,
that new arguments get to the fore now and then), it is automatically in the
mind of the scholar--again disregarding the beliefs of this
scholar--identified with a certain position within scholarship. It may be a
true assessment but can also be false, no doubt about it.

> Let me give one example. Since Gunkel or even before him, a particular
> good
> argument for a conection between Genesis and Babylonian sources was THWM
> of
> Genesis and TIAMAT of Enuma Elish. However, Claus Westermann,1984,"Genesis
> 1-11, p 105 wrote: "It is impossible phonetically and grammatically to
> derive THWM from the Babylonian Tiamat; THWM has a masculine ending,
> Tiamat
> a feminine; the H of the Hebrew THWN cannot be explained as deriving from
> Tiamat ...There is widespread agreement then that THWM and TIAMAT go back
> to a common Semitic root; but the occurrence of THWM in Genesis 1:2 is not
> an argument for the direct dependence of the creation account of Gen 1 on
> Enuma Elish." Someone may disagree, but in any case, a very good argument
> has been shown to be doubtful.
> 
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  The problem with Tiamat is that it is the name
of a god, the Akkadian word for sea being Tâmtu, Tiamat, if I remember
correctly derives from Old Akkadian ti'amtu which is masc. On the other hand
HALAT records tehöm as both masc. and fem. and thinks that it goes back to
common Semitic *tiham(at), "Sea" (p. 1557). It is 'already' in Ugaritic
either thm (m) or thmt (f), dualis thmtm, the place of El's abode.

> While I can see there are arguments for a later date for the Torah than
> 1400 BCE, none of the arguments presented so far are conclusive in my
> mind,
> and being agnostic toward the cases of the agnostics, I have to fall back
> on my previous claim and say that we can know nothing definitely about
> when
> the Torah was written.
> 
> 
        [Niels Peter Lemche]  Well, I believe that virtually hundreds of
good arguments have been put forward over the last two or three centuries.
That they do persuade Rolf Furuli is his concern, not mine.

        NPL








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