Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com> =====
>B-Haveray,
>
>Why is it that Dahood's work on Psalms (Anchor, 1965!) is not impacting
>recent translations, commentaries, lexicons?

Have you checked the Sheffield dictionary? They're supposed to be including 
just about every proposed word.

Speaking of Sheffield, if Clines is right, you might also want to check 
Catholic or Italian resources. According to him, philologists are divided 
into 
camps, each of which ignores the others. So maybe you shouldn't expect to see 
much of Dahood's influence in American or British Bibles, commentaries, or 
lexicons. (I'm not saying I agree with him, but it might be an interesting 
test case for his suggestion.)

Dahood may have done more to hurt Ugaritic studies than he did to help it. 
(See Mark Smith's account of the history of the field.) He seems to have some 
reputation issues among scholars, many of whom think he went too far in 
trying 
to find the answers to BH problems in Ugaritic. One of my teachers (who comes 
from the Albright camp a la Clines) noted when I picked up a free copy of 
Dahood's Anchor commentary on the Psalms that using it might hurt my 
understanding of the Psalms more than it would help. He refers to Dahood's 
work as a "bag of tricks" methodology and repeatedly warns his students 
against such things.

I say all of this not having done much myself with Dahood, but at least it 
might shed some light on why his suggestions haven't been more widely 
influential.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics