Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor Peterson" <speederson AT erols.com>]

>       [Thomas L. Thompson]  
>       I am not at all sure I can identify a very specific CBH. On the
> other hand LBH seems to have a string of characteristics that Hurvitz and
> others have convinced me exist as a particular form of the language and
> which do not exist in Iron Age inscriptions.

That's interesting, because I've usually seen them described the other way
around (by establishing the continuity of CBH first, then addressing how
LBH differs).  I'm not as familiar with inscriptions, though.  Are there
ways in which LBH differs from the inscriptions but is similar to supposed
CBH texts?

> However, CBH has not been shown
> to be "not-late" and thus to be chronologically datable on the basis of
> forms alone.

Hmm . . . how would one go about showing that it is "not-late?"  I would
think, especially since you question the suggestion of Aramaisms as
evidence of LBH, that you must rely on characteristics that are internal
to Hebrew.  How would you show that LBH is late, if you can't show that
CBH is "not-late?"

> I do not find the use of explanatory metaphors or scenarios
> such as schools or pubs useful, before we can first establish the
> classification of CBH. The distinction has to be clearly established before
> it can be adequately explained. If we could show that CBH is never late, we
> would be a lot farther in our effort to assert a useful chronology.

So what would you do with the possibility of a "classicist" trend at
various literary stages?  We've seen it with other languages--that writers
attempt to write in an archaic style.  What if we avoid concluding that
CBH is earlier because some Hebrew Classicists at Qumran were being
eccentric?

[snipped]
> 
>       Here, humility needs to take over. My problem is that I doubt we
> have either chronological development in our biblical texts or the ability
> to observe such development within the biblical corpus were such to exist.

Then, when you say that you believe the traditions are much more ancient,
are you saying that they would have been oral, or that the writers would
have used them in their own words, or that they would intentionally update
the wording when they incorporated them, or am I missing something?

> We have more than a millennium of text production by the shortest
> calculations and only 2 (or perhaps 2 1/2) chronological steps clearly
> identified.

I think I see your point.  So, if we hypothesize that the pre-exilic
material was brought into some degree of linguistic uniformity by its
writers, we would have to wonder why the same thing did not happen in a
later period.  But if the distinction between CBH and LBH could be
established, wouldn't at least one plausible model be that someone
somewhere along the line chose to massage the texts into uniformity, but
that the same thing did not happen again in a later period?  Another
possibility I could see is that the language actually did remain fairly
stable (at least literarily) over centuries until something major happened
to upset that stability (possibly an "exile" of sorts, possibly something
else).

> I can not silence my own quandery that if we could finally
> distinguish sharply between CBH and LBH so that CBH were always earlier than
> LBH, why would one need to date that transition sometime in the 7/6th
> century rather than in the 6/5th, 5/4th or 4th/3rd or 3rd/2nd or later.

Another good point.  Perhaps we'd need to look for a historical event that
would have shaken things up enough to cause such significant changes in
the literary forms of the language.  But I would guess that most of the
reason for picking that time is an acceptance of *the* Exile as the
pivotal event that the Hebrew Bible makes of it.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics