Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - diachronics and P

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu
  • Subject: diachronics and P
  • Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 13:40:27 -0400 (EDT)


randy, my friend,

i stayed up late last night, reviewing the methodological/theoretical
sections of Kropat, Polzin, Hurvitz, Rooker, as well as various articles.
i don't see any change in Hurvitz between 1972 to present. i honestly
wish i didn't have to keep rereading this stuff, to tell you the truth....
:-) then, of course, there's rendsburg.... <sigh>

re strawman:
i don't see any way around my mickey-mouse characterization of the
framework: early vs late; and dividing line is circa 600 BCE. the late
corpus is that identified by Driver: curious that Hurvitz leaves out
Esther when he lists the set of texts. re ideology: milgrom, e.g., on P
and Leviticus is at least a little more above board....

hurvitz explicitly says that the grammatical approach can't be right
(e.g., Polzin), because it gives the wrong order (and so leaves room for a
postexilic P, if you're not careful). the issue is ezekiel (he assumes to
mark the terminus ad quem of early or classical hebrew) vs P. hurvitz
requires, therefore, that P come before ezek. his lexical studies end up
showing this order. (the fallacy of assuming ezek = ca 586 is another
matter again.) P *must* come before Ezek, and he makes it come before
Ezek..... i guess the only issue between Polzin vs Hurvitz/Rooker is
precisely the order of Ezekiel relative to P.

of course, from a grammatical point of view, preexilic P is nuts: as even
Polzin demonstrated. Hurvitz rules out grammatical endings, etc, precisely
the material that gives you, in my humble opinion, the correct distribution
of
texts. interesting. oh well, there should be some interesting material
in press by now: my work should've been done for me therein..... but the
idea that a narrow lexical study should trump grammatical factors is
something else again: i would argue bizarre in the annals of historical
linguistics.

re my own work:
i'm in the process of writing up a monograph on corpus linguistics and
verbal morphological variation. the distribution is already found in my
JHS article online. it just so happens to jibe with the new (?)
history/archaeology, cf., e.g., Finkelstein, Silberman, The Bible
Unearthed. interesting little coincidence, i guess.....

i'm also working up the argument for Leviticus being dependent on Numbers.
;-)

re other work:
what do you think of Ian Young's 1993 book...?

cheers,
V--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dr Vincent DeCaen
Research Associate
Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
University of Toronto

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative (HSEI)
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Have you heard the one about the accountant?



  • diachronics and P, Vincent DeCaen, 05/26/2002

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page