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  • From: "Jan-Wim Wesselius" <jww AT xs4all.nl>
  • To: "Biblical Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Cc: "Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>
  • Subject: Re: Genesis and Greek Parallels
  • Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 15:11:23 +0100


On 19 February 2000, Henry Churchyard wrote:

>> Subject: Re: Gilgamesh and Genesis
>> From: "Jan-Wim Wesselius" <jww AT xs4all.nl>
>> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 19:50:43 +0100
>
>> Well, I would say that I solved this old problem (date of the
>> Pentateuch) (at least for the final form of the text) in my recent
>> article =91Discontinuity, Congruence and the Making of the Hebrew
>> Bible=92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13 (1999) 24-77:
>> certainly after the composition of Herodotus=92 Histories (i.e.
>> about 440 BCE), from which the general structure of Primary History
>> (Gen =96 2 Kings) has clearly been derived (nine books divided in
>> three groups: 1, 2-6 and 7-9 with a Great Campaign as main action,
>> congruence of the genealogy of the main family and their contacts
>> with the starting point of the Great Campaign, and much more)

>On the face of it this seems to be a rather grotesque hypothesis.

Taken literally, this is a correct observation. In fact, my article deals
with the method of composition of several historical books of the Hebrew
Bible. I demonstrate there that the structure of these books is determined
by the structure of earlier works. This certainly is a highly abstract
literary technique, but the only way in which I can explain the observation
that the general structure of one work can be derived from another one’s
through a small number of rules of transformation. Most of the links between
the works are very clear and must have been noticed millions of times, such
as the presence of confessions of guilt in chapters 9 of Ezra, Daniel and
Nehemiah, or the congruence of the linguistic composition of Ezra and Daniel
(in both: Hebrew-Aramaic-Hebrew). We have always underestimated the literary
sophistication of the Biblical authors, I would say, and in many cases
invented complex historical explanations for purely literary phenomena.

> Why
>would a third century B.C. Jerusalem temple scribe (for example) have
>even remotely cared about the vast majority of what Herodotus had to
>say, much less taken him as as a literary model (but only with respect
>to a few abstruse and abstract subtle schematic details of overarching
>structure, and _not_ with respect to most aspects of literary style)??

Such authorial intention is not easily discovered. But then I did not
formulate my theory because I like it to be this way, but because my
observations about the overall structure of the two works left me no other
way out. Look, for example, at tables 9 and 10 of my article (I can mail
them to those who do not have access to it), where I visualize the
relationship between the main family of the two works with the country where
the Great Campaign starts. I can imagine no mechanism which would make such
a congruence arise accidentally. The assumption of dependence of the
structure of Primary History on the Histories is the only way in which I can
explain these observations, but maybe someone else can think of an
alternative. But there is no way back into ignorance, so some explanation
must be found anyway.

>Does this mean that if Herodotus had chosen to digress about Egypt in
>the eighth book, the Exodus would have come between the reigns of
>David and Solomon????!!!!!

No, the fact that the second book deals with Egypt in both works may well be
accidental to some degree.

>(In fact, probably neither the existing
>book divisions of Herodotus' histories, nor the idea of a nine-part
>division, are even Herodotus' own...)


We simply do not know when this division was made. The agreement in number
is not essential for my argument, and one could argue that my observations
are the first confirmation that this division of the Histories is original
(!)


But let it be added that the close relationship between Histories and
Primary History can be observed without any recourse to this fascinating
literary method. Their main action is simply the same: a divinely inspired
campaign of an army of millions (the Israelites under Moses and the Persians
under Xerxes) to conquer a rich and fertile country on another continent
(Canaan and Greece), passing through the sea at or near the border between
the continents (the Yam Suf and the Hellespont) as if on dry land, which
after great victories finally comes to nought. Who is going to say that such
plots are commonplace in antiquity?

Well, let us look at it from the bright side: some old problems, such as the
genealogy of Moses, the enormous numbers in the Exodus story and the
bilingualism of the Book of Daniel, are solved in a very natural literary
way, and we Biblical Hebraists turn out to be not dealing with patch-work
texts, but with powerful and deliberate literary compositions. But I concede
that it is certainly a shocking theory, both in the religious and the
scholarly fields -- the latter, I would add, much more than the former.

>Henry Churchyard churchh AT usa.net http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/


Jan-Wim Wesselius, Hoekenes 26A, 1068 MT Amsterdam
Tel. 020 - 619 1535; fax 020 - 619 1636; e-mail jww AT xs4all.nl







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