Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

There are many reasons for following this lead. The majority of my opponents
have admitted--if I am not totally wrong--their evangelical background. Now
it is wisely against the charter of the list to discuss personal religion,
so i will abstain from that. It should however, be the duty of scholars not
belonging to this fraternity to stand up when they see a discussion coming
up which is misleading, out of date, nutured by beliefs that have been
rejected in scholarship at large. 

That the list is open to scholars as well as laypersons is an advantage--or
should be an advantage--but it demands that the non-professionals sometimes
step back and begin to listening. By stubbornly advocating theories way out,
not even followed any more by evangelical scholars such as the people who
contributed to Baker and Arnold, The Face of Old Testament Studies (Baker:
1999), they are showing a peculiar resistence to new and different ideas
that makes them stand out even within conservative scholarship.

Language and the concentration on language is good, but when we are speaking
about the history of language, it is not much worth without a general
historical knowledge, and the reference to the hellenistic date of the OT
and language as an argument against this is showing disrespect of the
historical argument, as well of showing a strange lack of linguistic
insight. One of the really funny things in the Hebrew, of say Songs and
Qoheleth is the reappearance of traits, such as the short relative reference
she instead of asher, prepositional genitive forms that look like something
we already find in Ugaritic but not in classical biblical Hebrew. Another
funny thing is the little variety in morphology found in the Pentateuch,
e.g. between the J-stratum and the P-stratum, formerly believed to have been
divided by half a millennium. In short, we know surprisingly little about
the history of the Hebrew language. We know a limited amount of inscriptions
from the Iron Age from diferent parts but would have troubles identifying a
case like the shibboleth affair (since epigraphical Hebrew does not
distinguish between shin and sin). I could go on and on. The problem again
that if somebody propose a diachronic axis for his study, another person
will demand a synchronic. What one person sees as diachronical differences,
another person will understand as sociodialects. Some have opted for a
special role of biblical Hebrew which shows peculiarities not found outside
the HB (the elaborate system of consecutive forms--although I had to correct
myself a while ago claiming that no consecutive form was ever found in
inscriptions), some have taken this as evidence of biblical Hebrew as an
artificial language, a 'Bible language', or representative of learned
Hebrew. 

All of this is very problematic and cannot be solved by recourse to a way of
studying the Hebrew text of the Bible that went obsolute a hundred years ago
(if not two hundred years ago). Then we are back to the typical situation of
throwing dirt. Because there will be no dialogue if a kind of consensus is
not achieved when it comes to general history, and to the history of the
Hebrew text of the Bible. The first requisite is to get the history right,
then we can process the next few steps, but if people in advance claim that
everything happened as told by the Bible, the historians (I mean the
professional ones) will have to say: No, this is not possible, and then we
have a stalmate instead of a discussion.

So history is still all-important if it is the intention to progress
somewhere.

NPL