Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Thomas L. Thompson" <tlt AT teol.ku.dk>]

> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra:  Thomas L. Thompson 
> Sendt:        22. maj 2001 15:29
> Til:  'Trevor Peterson'
> Emne: SV: QohSV: Qoheleth
> 
>       Dear Trevor Petersen,
>       These are fair questions and in an effort to help return to issues
> Hebrew, let me respond very simply to the non-Hebrew elements of your
> questions.
>       First of all I consider the term "mainstream" somewhat tendentious.
> We are all mainstream in our own duck ponds. How is Hurvitz more
> mainstream than Knauf and how is Halpern more than Van Seters? Mainstream
> is what the last generation of scholars formed. As for calling "us"
> something, follow my example: use our names and cite specific works. Over
> thirty years even the same author changes.
>       I have been in favor of dating biblical Hebrew since my Origin
> Tradition of 1987 and I still am. Although I find it difficult to assign
> dates to such complex secondary literature as we find in the Pentateuch,
> the Psalter and Isaiah because of their collective nature, I do think we
> have been able to establish on the basis of other texts what is often
> referred to as Late Biblical Hebrew. What we have had some difficulty in
> showing is that classical biblical Hebrew--including what seems to be used
> in some of the Hodayoth and other Qumran texts as well as in so-called 3rd
> Isaiah, P and many "late" psalms--is in fact earlier than late biblical
> Hebrew. Similarly, I am much disturbed that we do not see a linguistic
> development between DTR 1 and DTR 2 and am only relieved by the
> realization that the existence of such "texts" along with 3rd Isaiah and
> P, as independent strata of literature has been frequently cast into
> doubt.
>       I would be much more sanguine about dating things as pre-exilic and
> post-exilic were it not for the fact that we have had many exiles in
> Palestine between the 8th century BCE and the 2nd century CE. No clear
> historical arguments define the concepts that are essential to this
> chronology.
>       I would be much more sanguine about our actual (rather than
> theoretical) abilities to date biblical Hebrew if the methods used were
> less dependent on vocabulary and on largely unvalidated assumptions about
> Aramaisms. I would be even more sanguine if real chronology were more
> frequently used rather than story chronology associated with the
> documentary hypothesis, which got quite a thrashing by the mainstream in
> the 1960s and 1970s.
>       Yet I have strong hopes for this development and stress the issue's
> importance with my students.
>       It is not enough to say that dating biblical Hebrew is a good idea
> or that it is possible. One has also to do it and to show that in doing
> it, it makes a difference.
>       I am somewhat mystified by writers who seem to assume that dating
> biblical Hebrew would somehow make my task more or less difficult or my
> arguments more or less convincing. I really do not see how it has much to
> do with my issues. I do not see myself, for instance, as having a
> compressed view of the literary aspects of biblical texts. In this, I
> believe I have been consistent since my dissertation on the patriarchal
> narratives in 1971 to my article in the new issue of the Revue Biblique:
> namely, that the earliest literary developments of "biblical" traditions

> long antedate the gleam in Israel's father's eye.
>       Thomas
> 
>       Thomas L. Thompson
>       Professor, University of Copenhagen
>         
>       Trevor Petersen wrote:  
>       But, hopefully in the interest of drawing this
>       discussion back to B-Hebrew proper, I'm curious about something, and
> maybe
>       you could give me some help here.  (Please permit me to generalize a
> bit,
>       as it seems like you, N. P. Lemche, P. Davies, and some others are
>       generally saying a lot of the same things about this issue.)  What
> is your
>       take on the standard reconstructions of the history of linguistic
>       development in Hebrew?  When I think in terms of comparing it with a
>       language like Akkadian, where we have autographs surviving from many
>       different periods of the language and can establish some sort of
>       chronology of linguistic development, it seems like we ought to be
> able to
>       observe some similar changes in Hebrew and note their development,
> even if
>       the surviving forms are only later copies.  So, if we're to view
> most of
>       the biblical literature as post-exilic, or some such thing, how
> would the
>       linguistic differences that others have assigned to periods of
> development
>       (for instance, between most of Deuteronomy and 2 Chronicles where it
>       doesn't seem to take its language directly from Kings or some common
>       source) be explained?
> 
>       I guess one thing that intrigues me about this issue (and something
> that
>       seems to have appeared in this discussion) is that there are ways in
> which
>       it seems like the conservative scholar and (forgive me--I don't know
> what
>       you prefer to call yourself) what Halpern has labeled as the
> minimalist
>       are in a similar position relative to mainstream scholarship.
> Whereas the
>       conservative looks at a book like Isaiah or Genesis and tries to
> debunk
>       source analysis in favor of a comparatively early date within a
> century's
>       time for the whole book, it seems like you would be inclined to do
> the
>       same thing, except that it would be in favor of a comparatively late
> date.
>        Either way, both are arguing for a more compressed view of the
> history of
>       the literature, and both would therefore need to confront many of
> the same
>       arguments for a longer literary development.
> 
>