Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Karl,

Your post is completely ridiculous.  "For example,
from the internal date of Torah correlated to the modern
calendar, it was written before 1400 BC. That date
makes the study of Ugaritic, whose library dates
from two to six centuries later."  Huh!?!?  Ugaritic was
no longer spoken in 800 BCE!  In fact, in 1200 BCE,
Ugarit was destroyed.  While Ugaritic inscriptions
date from 1400 BCE onwards, some of them were
probably written or composed long before.  To compare,
you do not have a version of the Torah from 1400 BCE.
You have a book attested in the last few centuries BCE.
If you claim that the internal dates allow you to date this
book (Torah) back from 300 BCE to 1400 BCE, then
perhaps the Ugaritic inscriptions could be dated back
by the internal dates from 1400 BCE to 2500 BCE!
The real problem is that you make claims and statements
knowing nothing about Ugarit, or Ugaritic, and even
refusing to try to study Ugaritic because, well, you
already know it can't help you.

You give some hypothetical scenario.  Well, first off,
I wouldn't believe you on any date you give for a
document because you are not a linguist.  In fact,
you've shown some rather bad performance in this
area when you claimed a North Arabian inscription
written in the first few centuries CE was a
Canaanite inscription written 1500 years earlier.

Besides, your theoretical situation misrepresents the
way linguists work.  Given a document, linguists can
associate the document with known sets of data,
based on script, orthography, and language.  Each of
these sets of data is large, not a single document, and
the language of this set can be compared with others to
determine if the languages are related and how.  In any
case, none of this relates to the "internal date" of the
Torah.  It's already been suggested here that the
language of the Torah was revised over the centuries.
Your "internal date" theory cannot answer such a claim.
You just believe what you want and ignore the evidence.

The only person on this list who thinks that the generally
well-accepted evidence among linguists and historians of
all beliefs presented in the Ghayin/Ayin thread or in the
Saenz-Badillos book is not "evidence" is you.  Maybe you
would look at the evidence for a change, instead of
inventing facts about things you know nothing about?

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com