Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

        ...
> Your other arguments, which we have all seen enough times, may cast doubt
> on
> a 2nd millennium dating of the Biblical texts but are very far from
> showing
> that they are 2nd century.
> 
> As for your final question, I don't know and I don't care as it does not
> affect the issue. Come back if and when you can PROVE that the texts were
> written in the temple in the 2nd century, not just cast doubts in the
> general direction of selected other opinions.
> 
> Peter Kirk
> 
Peter,

there is no problem with the process of casting down. Even Qohelet reckons a
time to tear down and time to build up. You cannot demand that any critics
of a theory should be able at the first moment to substitute the theory with
a different one. It might take time to demolish a thesis that does not
really work--any longer--and substitute it with something new. Scholarship
is really about tearing down accepted mainstream ideas, and most advanced
theories become maintream some day or the other.

When you have moved away from, say Mosaic authorship to the Pentateuch--an
critical scholarship did that more than two hundred years ago--I see no real
difference between a dating of the pentateuch in the 10th or in the 2nd
century BCE--except from the quantive not very important one. Does 10th
century (or at least pre-exilic) have a special quality to you? Is it almost
Mosaic if from the 10th century? Is it no way Mosaic in from the 3rd or 2nd?
Is old age a quality in itself?

NPL
.