Biblical Hebrew Forum

["A. Philip Brown II" <philipbrown AT apbrown2.net>]

Yitzhak wrote Chris:
" you need to adopt the strategies of scholarship.  ...  After taking all
the inscriptions and fitting them together and seeing how they make up a
reasonable linguistic scenario, one can take the language of the Bible and
see where it fits in this picture.  Finally, after all this, one can take
the claims made by the Bible and see how, in light of the picture that we
have created of the linguistic development, the events described in the
Bible can be understood.  In the process, claims must be proven.  "would",
"could", "maybe", "circumstantially" are not good enough and only lead
toward a process of creating hypothetical but unlikely scenarios."

Philip writes:  
This form of scholarly strategy has been standard in critical biblical
scholarship for the last 150 years. And it is this strategy that frequently
causes critical scholarship to operate schizophrenically: critical
scholarship often argues strenuously for the validity of its conclusions
because they are based on the extant evidence and at the same time it is
ready to discard its conclusions the moment evidence becomes extant that
adjusts its understanding of the ANE's linguistics, history, sociology, and
so on.

The trail of critical biblical scholarship is littered with the remains of
discarded "assured results of scientific study," many of which declared this
or that datum of Scripture to be  ridiculous, impossible, or completely
unfounded (= no evidence was extant to support it).  E.g., the existence of
a people group referred to in Scripture as Hittites was once roundly denied
by critical scholarship. Once evidence became extant to support the biblical
data, the critical scholarly conclusion was discarded, but no change in
strategy is made.  The possibility that biblical data should be included as
evidence in formulating conclusions is rigorously rejected. 

At base, this strategy constantly forgets how meager the store of evidence
really is. If we focus merely upon the diachronic development of Semitic
languages, at best we can conjecture only lines of development and
relationships between the score of languages we know existed in the 2nd
millennium Levant. "Could," "maybe," and "seems" reflect the appropriate
mood in our positive assertions about ANE inter-linguistic relationships.

The exclusion of biblical claims regarding the ANE when compiling one's
evidential base is, I believe, methodologically irresponsible. Their
inclusion will by no means answer all our questions. On the other hand, the
privileging of extra-biblical evidence over biblical evidence is, all faith
apart, not scholarly.

If it is scientific-method-type scholarship we aim for, then all evidence
should be weighed, hypotheses formulated, and then theories constructed
which best account for all current evidence. Yet at the end of the day we
must confess our theories to be theories, nothing more.

Philip Brown
Cincinnati, OH