Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Jim West <jwest AT highland.net>]

To: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] logograms--an ode to Hebrew

At 07:14 AM 12/24/2004, you wrote:

> Jim, what you seem to have missed is that some books, although not Genesis 
> of course, are written in the first person, e.g. Nehemiah and the bulk of 
> Deuteronomy (not of course the last chapter), or have other internal 
> authorship claims, e.g. those in Jeremiah already mentioned. In fact a 
> large part of all the prophetic books (except for Jonah) consists of 
> material explicitly attributed to the prophet, although there is no 
> indication of who collected and redacted the material. You don't have to 
> accept these authorship claims if you don't want to, but you shouldn't 
> ignore them.

But a sermon BY a prophet and recorded by someone else can hardly be called 
a book by that prophet.  that's akin to saying "this book of "bushisms" is 
by george bush because they are quotations from bush.  Not so.  Neither can 
we claim that a book of quotations by Kierkegaard is a book by 
Kierkegaard.  To be sure, Jeremiah contains material from Jeremiah (as all 
the prophets contain material from the prophet named in the first verse or 
two) but that is not the same thing as saying the book is written by them.

as to Nehemiah- he's as fictional as Moses and Abraham; and fictional 
people don't write books, they are the subject of them.

Best

Jim


++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies
Quartz Hill School of Theology

http://web.infoave.net/~jwest Biblical Studies Resources
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