Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> Professor,
> 
> I, for one, have read and understood your points and those of the others
> trying to bring us back into line with what the "scholars" accept.  I
> have weighed them against my understanding of the texts and of the world
> in general.  I have also noted where they are based on interpretations
> and theories for which you and the others "correcting" us are no longer
> overtly stating the assumptions and possible sources of error, which you
> are taking as "fact."  You have done your job.  Now, in the light of
> Ezekiel 33:4, will you please allow us the right to either accept or
> reject your alarm and move on?
> 
> Also, I'm not sure what *you* define as an "evangelical background," as
> that term has been applied to many disparate groups.  Please, don't try
> to define it!  But your use of it does smack a bit of labelling, which
> may be interpreted as ad hominem.  I'm sure that painting with so wide a
> brush was not your intent.
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Paul
> 
        Basically I take 'evangelical' in the sense of conservative
scholarship as explained by James Barr, almost 25 years ago in his
'Fundamentalism' (London, SVM, 1977).  I do accept that conservative
scholars--and here I mean the really conservative, not the just conservative
(people staying with ideas that were around, say a hundred years ago)--do
not want to be labelled 'fundamentalists', especially if they do not think
of themselves as primitive Bible bullies. Some among this group wrote me and
explained that 'evangelical' was a word that is acceptable to people
belonging to this circle, and if they have no problem with it, I should have
none either. So I use the term in order not to attack anybody ad hominem. 

        The Hezekiel point is well taken, but again, if you think that you
can just read the biblical text as it stands--in Hebrew--and forget about
its background, i.e. the historical referent, the authorship and its
background, developments, both synchronic and diachronic, it is not my mail
that has nothing to do--in your eyes--with the scope of the list, it is your
mail that failed. 

        I ask people to evaluate the situation in scholarship. If they want
to play mavericks and run counter the establishment, for my part: do it, and
don't cry out when the establishment hits back. And believing this person to
be the run of the mill example of a scholar from the establishment tells me
that you should try to become acquainted with the many sides of present day
biblical scholarship. It s true that what I wrote twenty years ago (e.g. in
my Ancient Israel [Sheffield: JSOT, 1988--but originally published in Danish
in 1984]) is by now almost mainstream, but since then things have been
moving fast, and in many directions. If you side with the evangelicals (in
the maning expressed here), well, read the new Baker and Arnold volume I
have referred to several times; if you will stay in the middle, read some of
the mainstream scholarship that abounds at the present. If you want to know
what is going on on the left, read things by this author, or by Philip R.
Davies, or Thomas Thompson, and if it has to do with histoy, read some of
the stuff from Tel Aviv university.

        And again, finally, if you want to study biblical Hebrew, you should
know what you are doing. There is a vast difference between accepting a
diachronical perspective involving history as a referent, or a synchronic
one, disregarding the historical issues. However, if you want to do history
in a study of language, you need first to create a hierarchy between texts
basically part of one book and only preserved as we know them in a
manuscript from 1008 or 1009 CE. Which text is early and which text is late?
Sometimes scholars asume that a text is early, moves to its language and
claims this language to be early too, and them moves back to the text and
claims the text to be early because the language is early. Somehow this
naive idea broke down when the Balaam texts from Deir Alla were found some
thirty years ago, telling us that some of the presumed oldest texts in the
OT, the poems of Balaam in Numbers 22-24, were perhaps not very old at all.
At that time scholars even began to discuss the possibility that the Song of
Deborah (Judges 5) might not be as old as normally presumed.

        So if you realy want to discuss the history of biblical Hebrew, it's
about history and textual history. You cannot escape history. If not, you
can make quite satisfying linguistic analyses of the textual corpus without
having to resort to a diachronic analysis. This will say nothing about the
date of a certain text, but will be able to explain linguistic differences
that has to be accounted for in a future historical analysis.

        To dismiss any of this in advance because 'you' (the proverbial
'you') knows is simply telling the public that the person in question has
made up his mind and cannot be changed by any argument. This can be the
priviledge of the non-informed, but then it is 'our' (the proverbial
scholar) duty to say that this is incorrect.

        So whatever you think and like, you cannot escape the historical
questions if you are interested in history, also the history of a language.
And people on this list seem d... occupied with historical questions. So
reminding you of the Hezekiel text you referred to, it can be your own
undoing if you disregard the sound of the buggle.

        NPL