Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Shoshanna,

The "Hebrew Bible", as the term is used by everyone who speaks English, is
the Tanakh, not the just the five books of the Torah, or Pentateuch. And
Jewish tradition (have a look at Bavli Bava-Bathra 14a) considers the books
of Nevi'im and Ketuvim to have been written by different people, and Ezra to
have been the "editor" of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. So what Chris wrote
is perfectly correct - the writers of the individual books, including Moses
(assuming that he "wrote" the Pentateuch), could not have had a concept of
the Tanakh as a whole, since it didn't exist yet.

Yigal

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Shoshanna Walker" <rosewalk AT concentric.net>
To: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:10 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Inspiration


> The "Hebrew Bible" is the Torah, the whole collection including the
> Prophets and Writings is the Tanach - Torah, Neviim, Ketubim
>
> The Torah did not have multiple writers (that it did, is only one
> belief/theory), and it existed WAY before "they did their work."
>
> Shoshanna
>
>
>
>
> 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
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