Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Dear Ian,

You write:

>Now, before you go on, when was Chronicles written? I don't believe you have
>the necessary data to be able to answer this in a way meaningful to your
>argument. If my belief is correct, then you cannot treat the materials in
>the text as though they were significant to the era they cannot be related
>to, ie 10th century Jerusalem.

Jewish tradition from antiquity claims that Ezra wrote Chronicles, Ezra,
and Nehemiah, but this may or may not be true. Many scholars date
Chronicles to the second half of the fifth century B.C.E., leaving open the
possibility that Ezra was involved. The salient point is that Chronicles
uses many source documents, and there is no particular reason for doubting
the truthfulness of these sources.

>>It seems likely that David would have secured a site before drawing up
>plans.
>
>Again, what seems likely is not something you can talk about from your
>source materials. You can talk about the texts and what they say and perhaps
>which version of a tradition has priority. But we are only talking about
>texts and I can see no way of getting beyond the text. Can you?

You cannot get beyond the text, but I was dealing with the text. I was
making what may be called a reasonable hypothesis for correlating the data
from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles.

                                Yours,
                                Harold Holmyard
                                Dallas, TX