Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Jonathan,

when you have been in business as long as some among us you will have
received plenty of stuff--articles, pivately circulated papers, books, of
the kind which -- as far as can be seen from the many postings of Peter Kirk
-- stands outside the flow of scholarly literature. Here, at the moment a
five volume serioes devoted to Moses has begun to appear. The rule is
normally that if a layperson wants to receive attention, he or she will have
to send their contributions to the professionals for their attention. You
should know the amount of literature that has to be consumed in a year by
the professionals. They do not have the time to occupy themselves
extensively wiith the work of amateurs or non-scholars. That is one part of
the issue.

The second is that if you want to create a revolution in scholarship, you
need to control the available documentation, and you know to have some very
strong arguments and an immaculate string of reasoning. Otherwise your
colleagues will ignore you. I have personally had the good luck to propose a
lot of new and sometimes quite new ideas. Many scholars object to my theses,
but few of them without discussing them in earnest, simply because the
material is there, the evidence has been presented and discussed. It is to
play the game according to the rules.

The main basis of Rohl's argument seems to have to do with chronology,
moving things up and down by centuries. This will demand a very strong
foundation based on available sources. So far, Peter Kirk has not been able
to show this evidence to exist. Ancient Near Eastern chronology is not that
week. Basically it rests on Assyrian information which includes astronomical
observations suxch as the solar eclipse in 853 [otherwise show me that this
never happened], the year of the battle at Qarqar where Ahab or his forces
was present. This creates a synchronism between Ahab of Israel and
Shalmanasser III of Assyria. Now Assyrian chronology is generally not the
worst, as the limu-system (a system of eponymical listings of the
years--like the Romabn consular years) safegurds against too many deviations
from reality. Thus 853 is the ponym yar of Dajan-Ashshur. These list dos not
reach back to the LBA, but then we have regnal dates and synchronisms
making, e.g. Ashshur-Uballit I a contemporary to Hattushilish III of Hatti
[letters exchanged between these two monarchs] and of course we know from
many documents that Hattushilish III and Ramses II were contemporaries. So
when we includes the regnal year references in Assyrian sources (which run
without interruption from Ashshur-uballit to Shalmanasser III), and include
the synchronisms established by international documents, synchronistic lists
etc, etc. we end up with a date of Ashshur-uballit in the 13th century, with
Hattushilish III and with Ramses II in the same period, which again says,
overlooking Egyptian evidence from the early 19th dynasty and late 18th
dynasty that the Amarna period came before, say some fifty years.

So when somebody in a seemingly amateurish way wants to propose something
that turns this chronology upside down, it is not enough to say: 'hey, look
here, wouldn't it be possible that..?' If Rohl wants to become known, he
should post his ideas to accepted scholarly magazines and see the reaction
here. If his contribution is well-argumented, I see no reason that it cannot
be published, but the burden of proof rests on Rohl and his followers, not
on the opposite party, and his proofs need to be d... good.

NPL
 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Bailey [SMTP:jonathan.bailey AT gmx.de]
> Sent: Sunday, 13 February, 2000 05:47
> To:   Biblical Hebrew
> Subject:      Ethics of our Profession
> 
> I am earnestly dismayed at the group of people who are attacking Rohl
> without having 
> read him. I have stayed out of this discussion because I have not read
> Rohl. I, as a 2nd 
> year grad student know that is belongs to scholarly method to read a work
> before 
> discounting it with the type of authority that is being claimed here. I
> would like to know 
> that those who are bashing Rohl in such great detail without having read
> him are 
> proving themselves to be examples to me and young future scholars like me
> of what 
> we should try to avoid upon receiving our degrees and entering our
> careers. Their 
> utter abandonment of restraint and prudent judgment in order to speak with
> out 
> knowledge so they can support their prejudices is an embarrassment to the
> scholarly 
> community and does a lot to show what types of tendentious agendas are
> really 
> behind the methods of a great number of people who deceptively claim to
> have an 
> interest in uncovering the truth about biblical history. In fact, they are
> interested in 
> satisfying their own pride and protecting the egos and reputations of
> those whose 
> theories they have subscribed to, and therefore they must attack and
> discount out of 
> hand anyone who attempts to modify their corpus of dogma without even
> reading the 
> proposed modifications.
> 
> This is really a sad day. The ethics of our profession have really been
> layed low today. 
> Reminds me of Watergate.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "If there are many wisemen in a city, this means that the city will soon
> fall."
> Babylonian proverb
> 
> Jonathan Bailey
> Hochschule für Jüdische Studien
> Heidelberg
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Column/9707/index.html
> 
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