Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[4]: Stop with the Rohl material.
Author:  <mc2499 AT mclink.it> at Internet
Date:    13/02/2000 21:00


>> You simply cannot know about Rohl's theories if you have not read 
>> them, so instead you make assumptions about them.
>
>You seemed to think I could last post, when you assumed I was reading the 
> stuff. Please think before you write.
>
>PK: When I read some criticism by you of two specific points in Rohl's 
>book, I assumed

Peter, your unsupportable assumptions are part of the problem.

PK: Sorry, I will stop assuming that you are acting reasonably. I 
apologise for insulting your intelligence so blatantly.

>that you had acted in a proper scholarly manner by
>reading the material before commenting on it, although it was clear 
>that you had not read the associated footnotes.

The point is this, Peter, if you are not prepared to deal with standard 
works in your presentation of someone who your citations clearly show is 
giving tendentious analyses, do you think you have given any incentive to 
buy such a book which seemingly abuses scholarly practices rather blatantly?

PK: Who says that it "abuses scholarly practices rather blatantly"? 
Apparently only those who have not read it and so have no idea what it 
says.

<snip>

>So you were apparently
>relying on hearsay or repeating someone else's comments without 
>attribution.

You can make more assumptions.

PK: I am making a logical deduction from the premises which you have 
stated. If those premises are incorrect, the deduction may be. If so, 
please correct me. Specifically, what is the source of your 
information that Rohl links the names Goliath and Gulatu? Did you read 
Rohl's material (despite your denial), did you hear it from someone 
else, are you repeating someone else's comments, or what?

<snip>

>He was working on
>a Ph.D. on this, but I guess he has now lost his chance and been 
>excommunicated from the scholarly community for the unforgivable sin 
>of revealing their secrets to the world at large.

No, he's doing quite well thank you very much as a tour guide amongst other 
things.

PK: Are tour guides part of the scholarly community?

<snip>

Moreover, I have criticized his general presentation of the letters, 
surreptitiously accepting the old Albright analysis of "Habiru" equating to 
"Hebrew", when a wider reading of the letters would show the error. 
Consider for example EA 81 from Rib-Adda of Byblos to pharaoh: Abdi-Ashirta 
said, "Kill your masters and become Habiru, as (has done) Ammiya!" 
Obviously being Habiru had nothing whatsoever to do with a specific ethnos 
or more subtle paraphrases of the idea. In many letters you have people, 
even kings, joining the Habiru (eg EA 148). David may have been a "soldier 
of fortune" in his shaping of the data to try to fit his conception of the 
Habiru, but it is a shame that that conception doesn't seem to fit with the 
status quo for the last fifty years.

PK: If you read Rohl, you would discover that he does not identify the 
Habiru as an ethnos, but rather as a general term for people of 
various ethnic backgrounds who were stateless and wanderers. He 
clearly distinguishes them from the Israelites. Your criticism here is 
well wide of the mark.

Consider the use of Ps57 to extract a hypocoristic name for Saul. The psalm 
merely claims to be a poem of David "when he fled from Saul in the cave." 
In a general lament, the speaker says, "I am in the midst of lions (Hebrew 
'lebaim'); I lie among ravenous beasts - men whose teeth are spears and 
arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords." Somehow, the speaker, 
unanalytically assumed to be David, must be referring specifically to Saul 
here and alluding to the Saul's nickname (I bet this is the first time that 
most readers knew about such a nickname) and that that nickname 
miraculously was used in the Amarna letters for Saul instead of his "given" 
name. Under normal circumstances this would be called butterfly logic. On 
this sort of stuff rests the whole argument. This is incredible -- in a 
truly negative sense.

PK: It now seems clearer that you have skimmed this material or had it 
repeated to you from memory but have not read it in a proper scholarly 
manner. Rohl states that "his hypocoristic name is Labayu - his fuller 
name being unknown... 'Saul' is almost certainly not the name carried 
by the Israelite rule during his lifetime. It is rather a 'legendary' 
name..." This logic may also be dubious, but you need to argue from 
what Rohl actually wrote.

<snip>

Peter Kirk