Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ian Hutchesson" <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

From: Walter Mattfeld <mattfeld AT mail.pjsnet.com>

>If the Hasmoneans were responsible for writing the Primary History in the
>course of the second or first centuries BCE or even the Hellenistic era
>(after 332 BCE), how is it possible that NO hamlets, towns, or cities later
>than the 7th century BCE exist in the narratives ? One would have thought
>that if this was a creation of Hellenistic times, there should be a "few
>slips" and some sites attested as being no earlier than the Hellenistic era
>would appear in the narratives.

No-one claims that the texts were wholly written ex novo, Walter.

But how many of the cities in the area were virgin built in the Hellenstic 
era? When the Phillistines arrived a millennium earlier,
they mostly occupied old centres, though they built a few new places. One 
normally built where there were already cities, not in
spaces that would reduce the arable land. (Just think that Jericho had a 
relatively continuous occupation from the Neolithic until
the late Bronze Age.) This explains why cities tended to grow in height, as 
rubble was flattened down to provide new bases for
building, and why cities didn't wander too much.

As for a date indication in Kings, one finds references to two types of 
calendar, one being the Canaanite calendar including names
such as Etanim and Zif, the other using only numbered months, which is a 
reflection of a solar calendar. The earliest solar calendar
is that indicated by 1 Enoch as an improvement over the Persian 360-day 
calendar.

>The latest site I could find, coming into existence, was Aroer in the Negeb
>(1 Samuel 30:28)

Which sites would you like to see cropping up? Would you like to see the 
equivalent of a mention of Ai (= ruin) or of Raamses ([the
city] of Ramses)?

And how many of the cities in the "primary history" have actually been 
identified? The process of matching locations to names
mentioned in the bible does have a certain amount of dubiousness to it, 
doesn't it?

I think that building a case on the hope of a mention of an anachronistic 
city is quite a sandy foundation. (When you actually find
one, you then have to deal with the possibility that it was a scribal copying 
error, as that of Tadmor may easily have been -- yet
you may remember that I support an early rabbinical era for the production of 
Chronicles.)


Ian