Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Thank you, Ian. You make it difficult for me to answer by claiming copyright
on your posting, a first as far as I remember. So I can't quote it back to
you without your permission. I don't propose to ask for that.

I'm not sure what you think you gain from quoting three documents whose
dates are almost totally unknown. You cannot disprove any suggestion that
all three, or their Hebrew Vorlages, date back to the 5th century BCE; and
as you have often said there is no proof that Ezra etc are predate the 1st
century CE. (Though you line of argument tends to provide such proof: if
Ezra and 1&2 Esdras predate Chronicles, and since Chronicles is apparently
attested at Qumran, then surely Ezra etc predate the fall of Qumran.)

Your analysis of the relationships amongst the Ezra material is possible.
But there are many other possible explanations for the differences between
this material and 1 Chronicles 6. The one that springs to mind is that 1
Chronicles 6 is the most original version derived from Temple records, long
enough to cover the historical time and so likely to be close to the actual
historical succession. This list was then corrupted by haplography involving
a scribe slipping from one occurrence of "Amariah, Ahitub, Zadok" to
another - a well attested process - and this corrupted list made its way
into the Ezra material. It is simply not true that the shortest version is
always the most original. Indeed here I would argue that the shortest
version is manifestly not the original as it does not include enough
generations for the historical time span; but that argument does depend on
my presupposition that there was an actual historical sequence of high
priests.

Peter Kirk


-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hutchesson [mailto:mc2499 AT mclink.it]
Sent: 16 March 2001 06:15
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: Sam, Chr & Josephus (Peter)

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