Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On the Ugaritic, I'll have to double check. The last source I read indicated 
that its surviving texts were from about the same time as Raamses II the 
Great or later, which was centuries after Moses wrote Torah (e.g. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit ). Apparently there's some disagreement?

I already wrote that the only evidence I have is the internal dates indicated 
in the documents themselves.

But as for the "consensus of scholarship", it is like the emporer with no 
clothes. The whole "consensus of scholarship" has no evidence to back up its 
claims. Since it is the "consensus of scholarship" that has taken on itself 
to claim that Tanakh's internal dates are wrong, it is incumbant upon the 
"consensus of scholarship" to show the reasons for their claims. That has not 
been done. Instead, with hubris, the "consensus of scholarship" has taken on 
itself to discern "sources" where there is no physical evidence that such 
sources ever existed. Find those original documents, in Hebrew, and you'll 
have people like me singing a different tune. 

Instead, the earliest copies extant, indicate from their context, that they 
were copies of documents that predated them by centuries, basically unchanged.

I have already posted on this list that there is a recognizable development 
of the language, if we take the internal dates of those documents that 
claimed dates when they were written.

As for the Siloam inscription, its existance says almost nothing about the 
development of the Hebrew language. We need 1000 more that length or longer 
that are datable from about Moses to Alexander the Great, before we can point 
to stylistic reasons to doubt Tanakh's internal dates. And they must be in 
Biblical Hebrew. Well....where are they? Are there even 100?

The lack of physical evidence for either "consensus of scholarship" or for 
the traditional dates means that both views are more dependent on philosophy 
(a synonym for "religion") than archeology or history. With that being the 
case, neither view should be pushed as normative on any truly scholarly forum.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>

> 
> Karl Randolph wrote:
> 
> > The Arabic is a different language from a millenium later.
> 
> Both roots are attested in Ugaritic.
> 
> > Ugaritic post-dates the earliest Hebrew by centuries
> 
> Huh? Which Hebrew pre-dates Ugaritic? Please provide archaeological
> and inscriptional evidence.  If we assume at least two centuries for
> Ugaritic post-dating Hebrew, that would mean the earliest Hebrew is c.
> 1600 BCE?  What particular 1600 BCE inscription do you have in
> mind?  I know of none.
> 
> > But you have absolutely no historical data to back up your claims.
> 
> There's always the Siloam inscription.
> 
> > You, as the one challenging the internal claims, need to show 
> > actual data to show why the internal dates are not to be trusted.
> 
> No, you challenging the consensus of scholarship should show why
> you believe otherwise.  Uri does not need to prove anything when
> he takes the consensus reached by linguists and Biblical scholars.
> 
> Yitzhak Sapir

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