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  • From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Re: Job & Sumer
  • Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:49:42 -0500

Dear David K.,

In support of Dave Washburn's possibility thinking, some ancient orderings of the biblical books put Job right after the Pentateuch, and this may be due to the thought that Job lived in the patriarchal times. A popular conservative dating for Abraham puts his birth in 2166 B.C. By that scheme, if Job had been contemporary with Abraham, then his story could have been written prior to 1700 B.C. I've recently been reading about the canon, and the fact came up that the ancient rabbinic Jews had several conceptions about when Job should be dated, and a patriarchal date was one of them.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard

Sure, why not? We're dealing with what I call the accident of preservation,
for one thing. The LXX and DSS were done on parchment or papyrus, whereas
the Sumerian documents were done on fired clay. Is one likely to survive
longer than the other? I would hope so. Furthermore, the DSS are not the
oldest examples of "recorded Hebrew writing" that we have. ISTM that the
paragraph below has one standard for Sumerian and another for Hebrew, which
is not a valid procedure. We have no real idea how old the Hebrew language
is, and were it not for the accident of preservation, we wouldn't have any
idea that Sumerian ever existed. Basing such crucial decisions on the whims
of nature seems like shaky ground to me.




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