Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

At 19.06 07/06/00 +0100, Peter wrote:
>You are making unwarranted assumptions here that BH text is dated at the
>same general time period as the DSS. 

Peter,

Though you don't seem to have any defendable position about when the texts
are dated, you shouldn't make unwarranted assumtions about what I am doing.

>The BH narratives certainly purport to
>be several centuries earlier, 

So does Gore Vidal's "Julian". Ben Hur. Daniel. Judith.

>and there is no proof that they are not what
>they appear to be. 

As I have shown in the past, the texts are not what they appear to be to
modern readers. It's not strange that a text can be taken wrongly when read
out of context: think of Gulliver's Travels as a children's book, or
Wuthering Heights as a young girls romance. I have seen no attempts to
reconstruct the context of the writing of the biblical texts.

Some of the texts we are referring to have "historical" anachronisms (in
that some things don't fit what actually happened in the past), which I
have signaled a number of times, regarding for example Genesis. Here's
another brief one: "The Wandering Aramaean" didn't start wandering until
the climatic change post-1200 BCE drove the Aramaeans out of the steppes to
find other ways of surviving and caused such problems that Tiglath-pileser
I saw fit to deal with them. This was the first time they emerged, ie 1100
BCE. (There were however other nomadic Semitic groups mentioned before that.)

With a Hebrew language unaffected by hundreds of years of contact with
Egypt and so similar to Phoenician of the ninth century, we have a language
that doesn't fit the literalism of modern interpretation of the biblical
texts. Garbini notes that the major difference between Hebrew and
Phoenician is the Aramaic influence on Hebrew, with Phoenician being more
conservative. When did that Aramaic influence take place? Some time after
the Aramaeans were forced to leave their earlier homelands in the north.

What relationship is there between the little that has been gleaned about
the earliest Hebrew found and biblical Hebrew?

What trace is there of anything one might call a sub-stratum of an early
form of Hebrew in the biblical literature to indicate writing before
biblical Hebrew and only edited later? One would expect, for a text
literally interpreted as purporting to cover over a thousand years, signs
of linguistic change.

>So we may be talking about a time gap of several
>centuries rather than, or in addition to, a shift in social situations.

Are you saying that most of the texts were not written in or around the
temple? Or maybe they weren't? Or there is a slight chance that they
weren't? Or that you don't know?


Ian