Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Banyai AT t-online.de (Michael Banyai)]

OK Peter,

I understand you. In this form does your opinion make sense. I have my own 
opinion too, which could explain some of the problems Michael formulated, but 
in a different way.

The mentioned worked are not created ex-nihil, but by a procedure of largely 
pasting and glueing together by shorter more recent connectiont texts of the 
hand of the editor of older texts. The result would be a text displaying 
chronological features of different writing periods of the paragraphs. 
Probably did some editing modernised some entirely anachronistical features 
of a text. 

See in Samuel the long lexical explanations given to the use of the word 
"seer" (like in the Balaam inscription) instead of the modern "prophet". The 
editor is well-knowing his reader could have problems with the older term, he 
decides to preserve it, but offers a gloss.

So I prefer replacing the concept about the "writers" of the biblical texts 
with that of the editors, which had much greater influence on the outlook of 
the texts, as one would normaly concede to an "editor".

All the best,

Bányai Michael