Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Niels Peter Lemche wrote:
>
>       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.

snip
>
>       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.


Dear list-members,

I am not addressing Niels only but all of you, bacause my subject is
clearly different from the "was"- thread, though I take it as a point of
departure?

I for one often find myself in a position critical to the establishment.
This is not because I *want* to be different, but rather because I am
forced to react because I see that the critical methods we as students
learned to use toward our material often is not used in a self-critical way
by the establishement itself. For instance, I admit that I shudder when I
read a clause like "most experts accept this view". What is most needed in
the modern disciplines of history, chronology, textual criticism, and
linguistics which are related to the Old world (the Middle East in biblical
times), as I see it, is an acute consciousness of the problem of induction.
Any student of the Old World must rely on a host of premises that s/he has
never studied and therefore s/he cannot know that they are reliable. These
premises are used because leading spokesmen of the establishment use them,
so s/he takes them for granted. There is nothing methodological wrong in
this, we have to take many things for granted. What can be criticized,
however, is the situation when it is *forgotten* that these unproved
premises exist, and when one behave as if one's foundation was
unimpeachable. But sad to say, this uncritical view toward one's own
position seems to me to be the rule rather than the exception. It is often
forgotten that just as the existence of "God" cannot be proved in the
philosophical sense of the word, similarly *history* (including chronology)
cannot be proved. So why should we pretend that the present view of the
establishment regarding the date of the biblical text or when Israel
entered Canaan is the truth and nothing but the truth.


This being said, I must stress that I have nothing against critical
scholarship, (provided that its limitations are kept in mind), so therefore
I pose my questions (and these are sincere questions in order to get good
input:


(1) There can be no doubt that there are old and young traits in the
biblical text (the MW-suffix in some Psalms versus compound verbs
consisting of a participle and a finite form, as examples), but is there a
way to date the text on linguistic grounds? Do you have any sources?

(2) To date the different books on linguistic means is one thing, to show
that the meaning of the verbal system has changed from the old parts to the
new parts of the Tanach is quite another thing. Is it possible to
demonstrate such a change without a particular presupposition about the
meaning of the different parts of the verbal system,i.e. can it be
demonstrated without circular aguments? Do such studies or attempts exist?

(3) Will different views regarding the age of parts of the text or of the
whole text affect our understaning of the classical Hebrew verbal system?
In other words: how will a view that the whole text is younger than the
sixth century affect our understanding of the verbs compared with a view
that parts of the text are much older? Do we have any sources here?

In short, I have heard so much about the importance of diachronic studies,
and that this authority hold this view regarding the change of the verbal
system and that authority holds that view. But where are the studies and
where are the methods and where are the data? I do not mean to be
sarcastical, I do not mean to make fun of anybody or anything, and I do not
belittle the fine work done by hundreds of able workers in the field. But
in all sincerety, I have tried to find sound methods for a diachronic study
of Hebrew verbs, but so far without success. Can anybody help?





Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo