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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] John Gill and his dissertation - the Death blow?

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: wattswestmaas <wattswestmaas AT eircom.net>
  • Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.Ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] John Gill and his dissertation - the Death blow?
  • Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 18:42:54 +0100

On 27/03/2005 15:40, wattswestmaas wrote:

Peter,

Would it then be a thoroughly correct and empirical statement to INSIST that
there is no reasonable argument in existence that can even suggest the
possibility that either vowel pointing or square script was being used in
the time that Moses wrote (or his personal scribe) wrote hebrew.

Do scholars have access to sufficient documentation that safely precludes
such INSISTENCE that a possibility might arise to the contrary.


In these matters very little can be proved absolutely, as arguments from silence are never completely certain.

But, assuming that you are dating Moses some time well before 1000 BC, he was writing several centuries before the date of the earliest known inscriptions using anything remotely like the square script, and before a time when it is well demonstrated that the Israelites were using the archaic Hebrew (or palaeo-Hebrew) script.

And he was writing about 2000 years before the earliest known examples of vowel pointing, so I think it is fairly safe to conclude that he would not have used vowel pointing, at least in anything like its modern form. (I say that last phrase because I would not want to rule out 100% that he originally used cuneiform in a way analogous to the Amarna tablets, which do indicate vowels although not as pointing. But we have no evidence for such usage, no surviving tablets that could conceivably linked to Moses or the Pentateuch.)

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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