Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Yitzhak:

Not all of us agree with the existance of this speculated "J" author, nor "D" 
nor "E" nor the whole mess.

While you admit to being a beginner, I cannot. While I don't have the formal 
education that others have, I have lost track of the number of times I have 
read Tanakh in Hebrew. Cover to cover. The last few times without points. 
This was not just reciting the text out loud, but using dictionaries and 
grammars to try to understand what I read. Hence, it would be false modesty 
to claim that I am a beginner.

Unlike Wellhausen, his predecessors and followers, I have no preconceived 
presuppositions that will lead me to assign dates for the authorship of books 
other than the internal ones, where they exist. 

Taking the internal dates, one can recognize a stylistic development of the 
language, where language use became increasingly stylistic, with figures of 
speach and flowery language, until the last generation who learned only 
Hebrew from both at home and neighborhood typified by Ezekiel and Daniel (by 
the time Daniel wrote his book, he was more at home in Aramaic, which he used 
in his daily work in the courts of Nebucadnezzar through Cyrus, than Hebrew), 
then after the Exile there is a stark simplicity with the greatest complexity 
found in direct quotes from pre-Exilic writings.

Working among immigrants, I see the same pattern as children who speak 
English better than their parents' languages, try to communicate with the 
immigrant generation. I hear the strong American accents, the inability to 
make some of the sounds common to the immigrant population, in other words, a 
change in the spoken language. That change among the immigrant population 
appears to be similar to a change in Hebrew caused by Aramaic to which I see 
clues in the post-Exilic Hebrew language. From a stylistic analysis, it looks 
as if the generation that returned from the Exile were more at home in 
Aramaic than Hebrew.

Now to the Kuntillet Ajrud writings: if one takes the internal dates of 
Tanakh, they are later than Torah (including Deuteronomy), many of the 
Psalms, and some of the historical records that were later redacted after the 
Exile as well as some other writings preserved in Tanakh. If the Kuntillet 
Ajrud writings are correctly understood (there is some question apparently on 
some of them) they typify not the beliefs of the Torah and prophets, but of 
the common people who, to the great consternation and disapproval of the 
prophets, practiced syncretism with great abandon. In fact, the picture given 
in Tanakh is that only a small percentage of the people consistently 
practiced the prophetic religion, culminating during Jeremiah's time that 
even the religious leaders turned their backs on Yahweh. So rather than being 
an example of early prophetic religion, Kuntillet Ajrud is an example of the 
very syncretism the prophets fulminated against.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
>
> ...
> 
> I view myself as a beginner :-)
> 
> ...
> 
> What does such a parallel show? In my opinion, if a site
> selected at random appears to match the beliefs of the
> independently conceived "J", it should give you a hard
> time explaining why the independently conceived "J"
> has no basis in reality.  "Just a coincidence" is not very
> convincing, since logical arguments were used to
> separate J from amongst the verses of the Torah.
> 
> Yitzhak Sapir
-- 
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