Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>]

Shoshanna,

I am not sure what you mean, or perhaps you are not sure what I mean,  
or both. It seems to me a simple, logical fact, indeed almost a  
matter of definition (not an "idea" or "theory"), that the collection  
we call the Tanakh could not have existed as such--I mean as a  
completed collection--until after all of the individual parts thereof  
were written. I suppose one could envision a kind of "rolling corpus"  
of scriptures to which writings were added one by one--and in fact  
something sort of like that may be part of the "canonical process" by  
which the various books within the Tanakh were combined to become the  
Tankah--but earlier stages in that rolling corpus would still not be  
the "Tanakh" or "Hebrew Bible" (as we know it) until all the books  
had been added. This seems to me a simple truism. But again, if I  
have totally missed your point, I apologize for that.

Chris

On Aug 1, 2005, at 7:42 PM, Shoshanna Walker wrote:

> This is only one idea/theory
>
> Shoshanna
>
>
>
>
> The
> writers of the Hebrew Bible did not know of the existence of any such
> thing as the Hebrew Bible, nor could they have, because it did not
> exist until well after they did their work,
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew

--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info