Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

        It is more likely that the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Hittites,
etc. no longer
        existed in Ezra's time, and that basing himself on what was written
in the Torah, he is
        using these peoples as a metaphor for the non-Jews then living in
Judah.

        Sincerely,

        Jonathan D. Safren
        Dept. of Biblical Studies
        Beit Berl College
        44905 Beit Berl Post Office
        Israel

        Nice, I couldn't have said it better. 

        As to talking about the existence of a book before the oldest
manuscript, this is obviously true that we cannot prove that a book is not
older than the oldest manuscript, but it is d... hard to write a history of
this book without manuscripts. I mean the Uppsala School of Engnell and the
German Überlieferungsgeschichte tried that for decades. Did they really
succeed?

        Much of this discussion has been a distortion of what I wrote back
in 1993 (in the article about the Hellenistic Book) that the starting point
of any discussion about dating must be the oldest text available. That was
also the opinion of, say Ivan Engnell, but the Uppsala school of tradition
history soon turned it upside down and began to analyses the tradition from
the origin, and trace the development over, say a thousand years. A
beautiful novel they wrote but it was really not very helpful.

        NPL